
Class 



Book 



1s&. 



Copyright N°. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



NATURE, 
THE MIRROR OF GRACE 



Nature, 
The Mirror of Grace 



STUDIES OF 
SEVEN PARABLES 



By 

ROBERT ELLIS THOMPSON, S. T. D. 

': 



1 Know ye not this parable? and how shall ye know all the parables?' 
Mark iv : 13. 



PHILADELPHIA 

THE WESTMINSTER PRESS 

1907 



y.»-. 



HBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 
MAY M 1907 



<> 



a 



yntfit Entry 
S #. XXc, No, 
COPY B. 



lAC„ NO. 



Copyright, 1907, 

by the Trustees of the Presbyterian Board of Publication 

and Sabbath-School Work 



Published, March, 1907 






CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Light 3 

II. Life 19 

III. Sheep 41 

IV. Food 53 

V. Touch 69 

VI. Sowing and Reaping 85 

VII. Upward , in 



PREFACE 



The language used by our Lord with regard to 
his own teaching by parable implies that there is 
a correspondence between the facts of nature and 
those of grace, which his people are to find a profit 
in studying. Such a correspondence is assumed 
throughout the Scriptures of both Testaments. 
It is implied in the terms by which spiritual 
truths are expressed, as these are derived from 
natural objects and transferred to the truths of the ~ : 
kingdom of God. 

We generally speak of the parables as meaning 
those which our Lord employed in the Gospels. 
He uses this method of teaching more directly 
and frequently than is done in any other part of 
the Bible, but not with the assumption that he is 
exhausting the analogies with which he is dealing. 
Mark tells us that when the disciples were puzzled 
by the parable of the Sower, and asked its mean- 
ing, he said to them : "Unto you is given 
the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto 
them that are without, all things are done in par- 
ables . . . Know ye not this parable? and how 
shall ye know all the parables ?" This seems to 
say that it is the mark of his people not to rest in 

vii 



viii PREFACE 

the natural sense of natural facts, as do those who 
are without, but to see beyond them to spiritual 
truth. He reads us a few pages of the great 
book, and puts it into our hands that we may read 
the rest. 

His people indeed have been reading in this 
book ever since, and many of the church's best 
teachers have busied themselves with it. Origen 
and Augustine in the patristic age; Anselm and 
Hugo of St. Victor in the Middle Ages; Luther, 
Heinrich Miiller and Christian Scriver, among the 
older German writers ; John Spencer and Thomas 
Fuller, in England; Hugh Macmillan, George 
Macdonald and Mrs. Alfred Gatty, in our own 
time, have rendered good service as interpreters of 
the parables. These are names which occur to 
me, but there are many others who have laid us 
under obligations. 

The parables I have tried to interpret more fully 
are all of them suggested in the Scriptures. They 
run through the whole texture of the Bible, ap- 
pearing more fully in some parts than in others. 
They are but a few out of a great number which 
are found in the good book. 

Several of them have appeared in brief in con- 
tributions to The Sunday School Times, but they 
are here much fuller and more complete. 
Philadelphia, 1906. 



I 
LIGHT 



NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 



CHAPTER I 



LIGHT 



"I am the light of the world : he that followeth 
me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the 
light of life." These words, with which Thomas 
a Kempis begins his "Imitation of Christ/' refer 
to the moment in the Feast of Tabernacles at 
which the two great candelabra, unused at other 
times, were lighted up in the court of the temple, 
so that the light they gave shone over the whole 
city. Our Lord takes them as a symbol of his 
own position as the giver of spiritual light to man- 
kind. He says in effect : "I am the light, not of 
your city only, or of your nation alone, but of the 
whole earth. He that followeth me, in whatever 
corner of the world, shall he not stumble as one 
that walks in the darkness. He shall have the 
light he needs to live by — the light that gives life." 

The parable is not a new one. Light as a 



4 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

symbol of a spiritual blessing is recognized in all 
the religions of the world, especially that of 
Persia. In the Old Testament, notably in Job, 
Isaiah, and the Psalms, light is thus used. It is 
more spoken of in the Gospel of John than in any 
other part of the New Testament, and with one 
exception (v. 35), always as connected with the 
personality of our Lord and his influence upon 
men. Both the evangelist and our Lord himself 
find in light the natural fact which most resembles 
that divine activity, by which he was working 
upon his own people and upon the world at large. 

It was as a symbol of this divine influence that 
light itself was created. It was the firstborn of 
creation, for God said, "Let there be light I" before 
he called order out of chaos. It was even then 
the visible symbol of that divine word of God, 
by whom "the world was framed/' of him with- 
out whom "was not anything made that hath 
been made." The Fourth Gospel, with that Genesis 
narrative kept in mind throughout, describes our 
Lord as the spiritual sun, sustaining a relation to 
the spirits of men as universal as that of the 
natural sun to the physical life of our planet — as 
"the true light, even the light which lighteth every 
man, coming into the world," although too often 
shining in the darkness and not apprehended. 

Natural light is a many-sided fact, and it is 



LIGHT 5 

worth while to study its functions to see what help 
they give us to understand the workings of that 
divine light which it symbolizes. 

i. The nature of the natural light was a 
mystery to those who first investigated it. They 
supposed it to be a very subtle substance, poured 
into our planet from the sun; but this we know to 
be impossible. The most refined material sub- 
stance, if hurled upon our planet at the rate light 
moves — ninety-five million miles in eight min- 
utes — would destroy it utterly. This more 
material conception has been replaced by the view 
that light is a subtle force, transmitted in waves of 
an all-pervading ether, and reaching every part of 
the universe, from the great centers of light and 
heat we call suns. 

Our Lord's association of light with life cor- 
responds to the natural fact. It gives force and 
vitality to vegetable existence, and health and joy 
to animal existence. It circulates in every vein 
and tingles in every nerve of the animal world. 
Take it away, and the plant dies ; the animal wilts. 
So the nature of both plant and animal craves the 
light. There are, indeed, fish in the Mammoth 
Cave of Kentucky, which never have had a ray of 
light fall upon them, and their eyes have all but 
disappeared, having been "atrophied through 
disuse." But they are a poor kind of fish, 



6 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

degenerate descendants of those which lived in the 
light of day. Those of us who have tried to live 
and work in rooms, whose windows open only to 
the north, find how needful the direct light of the 
sun is to physical health. 

The vegetable world illustrates this craving of 
life for light in very striking ways. I once w r ent 
into a darkened cellar, which the light pene- 
trated at but one small window, darkened by cob- 
webs. At the other end of that cellar lay a few 
potatoes, which had budded and sent out long 
runners, some twenty feet in length and ghastly 
white, toward that distant window. It was as 
pathetic a sight as the vegetable world could fur- 
nish, and a parable too palpable for anyone to 
miss. 

The spiritual Light of the world is the subtlest 
and most pervasive of the forces which act upon 
humanity. Like the light of day, he moves 
through men's lives silently, swiftly, with no 
blare of trumpets or prancing of processions, but 
as gently as the dew falls upon the grass, or the 
sunlight shines into the opening flowers. He 
does not cry aloud in the world's market places, 
nor is he heralded in its newspapers ; but he passes 
to and fro, in ceaseless and unmeasured energy 
among the hearts of men. His knock at the door 
is as quiet as the sunshine which awakens them 



LIGHT 7 

every day from sleep; but if any man open unto 
him, there he dwells in lasting and life-giving in- 
fluence, making his home. 

Our natures were made for this Light, and they 
crave it as pathetically as those potatoes craved 
for the light of day. As Tertullian says, "The 
soul is naturally Christian," for we were made for 
him, and can have no lasting satisfaction apart 
from him. But we are not bound to him by the 
compulsion of natural law, for we have the fatal 
power to choke and deny our craving for him. 
"They will not come unto me that they may have 
light," he himself said of his own countrymen. 
He can be no more to us than we choose to have 
him be. He knocks at the door, but it is purs to 
open. If we refuse to open it, we are shutting 
out the health of our spirits; for the holiness he 
brings is the health of the heart. It is walking in 
the light, and living the true life in the true way. 

II. Light is the parent of color, and color is 
the natural symbol of joy. We have come to 
know what color is through the study of light. We 
now know that nothing has color in itself, but only 
through the fitness of its surface to absorb some of 
the rays of which light is composed, and to re- 
flect the rest. "All cats are black in the dark," it 
has been said. So are all flowers; so are all 
people. It is only under the light that differences 



8 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

in color exist. What would have been a dull, 
colorless, and cheerless world, is arrayed by light 
in all the colors of the spectrum. 

So in the human world, joy is the child of the 
light. Counterfeits of joy there may be without 
it — amusements, diversions, pastimes, and dis- 
tractions. But, as each of these words confesses 
by its first and strict sense, these are but devices 
to kill time, and to keep us from thinking with the 
gravity and sincerity which befit human beings. 
It is impossible that they should fill our hearts or 
satisfy our inborn craving for joy. We are so 
made that the whole world, apart from God, is 
not enough for us. That is our glory and our 
pain. That is the hunger which devoured the 
heart of the prodigal in the far-off land of riot 
and waste. 

God means joy for us. He does not mean us 
to accept what George Macdonald calls "the gray 
look of life" as the true one. It is not for a col- 
orless and cheerless existence, even of duty, that 
he has made us, but for gladness and happiness. 
So his Son is the joy-bringer. He established a 
kingdom, which is not only "righteousness and 
peace," but "joy in the Holy Ghost." The truth 
of this is seen in the lives of the first Christians, 
who had very little of what the world calls wealth, 
who stood daily in peril of their lives; who were 






LIGHT 9 

despised by their fellow-men as little better than 
mad. There is no body of literature in the world 
that is pervaded by such an uplift of a great joy 
as is the New Testament. They abounded in 
joy, and even "took joyfully the spoiling of their 
goods." 

III. Photography shows that there are rays of 
color in the spectrum both above and below those 
which our eyes can distinguish. In some, the 
vibration of the waves of the ether is too rapid for 
our eyes to follow; in others too slow. If our 
eyes had a wider range, we should discover in the 
natural world a wealth of color, as real as our 
reds, blues, and greens, in addition to that which 
we now see. When we get better eyes than we 
now have, we will see them. 

So in the spiritual world, we are told, there 
are heights and depths of joy of which we in this 
life can know nothing. We cannot even imagine 
them, the apostle says after having had a glimpse 
of them (I Cor. ii: 9). But as the color we see 
suggests and makes credible to us the color which 
is beyond our seeing, so the joy we already have 
makes it possible for us to believe in a gladness and 
a delight beyond our experience, and we come to 
look for a rapture of peace and contentment bet- 
ter than earth has at its best. "Enter thou into 
the joy of thy Lord," are the words which 



io NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

welcome faithful servants into the life beyond 
death. What that joy is we are able to guess from 
the language of our Lord, when he speaks of "joy 
in the presence of the angels of God over one 
sinner that repenteth." It is the joy of lifting up 
the fallen, comforting the sorrowful, welcoming 
the lost — the rapture which lights up heaven with 
a fresh gladness to its uttermost bounds, when the 
Father welcomes back a lost son. In that great 
fellowship of joy and service, the boundless yearn- 
ings, and the unsatisfied capacities of our human 
nature, will find their fit satisfaction — 

"New senses, new rewards of sense, 
The spectrum filled, all dark lines bright" 

IV. It is through light that we learn the real 
magnitude of all things in our natural life. We 
are dependent upon sight for our sense of size 
and distance. The baby grasps at the plaything 
either too far or too near to catch it, until he 
learns to measure distances by focusing his eyes. 
If we waken in a dark room and try to find the 
door, especially if the room and its contents be 
not familiar to us, we seem to go miles in search 
of it. It is through light that we perceive the 
bulk of things. 

It is in the Light which Jesus Christ is and im- 
parts that we learn the true magnitudes of life, 



LIGHT ii 

and discover the smallness of the small and the 
greatness of the great. Very much of our Lord's 
own teaching is directed to this difference. He 
labors to bring his hearers to discern what is great 
enough to be worthy of their attention, and what 
is small enough to be a negligible quantity. This, 
for instance, is his leading purpose in the para- 
bles of the precious pearl, and of the treasure hid 
in the field. He applauds the business man's sense 
of what is best worth having, and his acting 
promptly and without reserve on ascertained 
values. On the other hand, he warns us all 
against the mistake of assuming that the best 
worth our having is what the world counts as 
such, and rebukes men for taking the measures of 
the market place for those which really test suc- 
cess in life. Not the honor of men, but the ap- 
proval of God ; not the meat and clothing which 
cherish material life, but life itself, which is more 
than a living; not the "much goods laid up in 
store," but the riches a man can carry beyond 
death, he insists are worthy of our aroused atten- 
tion. "True religion," says Jonathan Edwards, 
"is nothing but to know small things to be small, 
and great things to be great, and to act on that 
knowledge," 

V. The natural light not only moves on 
straight lines, but is reflected and refracted into 



12 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

spaces it would not reach directly. If it were not, 
there would be entire darkness wherever the rays 
of the sun did not fall. The electric light has 
very little power of refraction, so the shadows it 
casts are very deep, and it is necessary to clear 
away the branches of the trees on streets lighted 
by it, where these come in its way. The sunlight 
shines around corners and into rooms whose 
windows face only to the north, though not so 
clearly or healthily, as I found from using a room 
of that aspect for a library. 

The spiritual rays of the Light of the world are 
reflected and refracted in much the same way, to 
the spirits of those who turn their mental windows 
away from him, but who are living in a Christian 
community, where his presence and his influences 
are welcomed by others. It is sometimes ob- 
jected that the Christian virtues cannot be de- 
pendent upon faith in our Lord, since such people 
as John Stuart Mill and Francis Power Cobbe ex- 
emplified many of those virtues while rejecting 
his claim to be the Light of the world. Let us 
not forget that they lived in a society pervaded by 
the influences of the Christian gospel, and in in- 
timate relations with those who cherish those lofty 
ideals of character which are realized in the per- 
son of our Lord. It would have been otherwise if 
they had lived in a community which shared their 



LIGHT 13 

denials;* and they would have been better and 
happier if they had lived "by faith upon the Son of 
God." They lost much and gained nothing by 
having the windows of the mind turned to the 
cold north of unbelief, and by being dependent 
upon others to reflect to them that which they 
should have received directly from the Son of 
man. 

VI. In the natural world, as we see it on the 
surface of our planet, light and darkness appear 
to balance each other. We get more light in 
summer, and more darkness in winter, but taking 
the round year they seem to be equal. But this 
is a delusion, due to our being badly placed for a 
true observation of the matter. On the earth's 



* "When the microscopic search of skepticism, which has 
hunted the heavens and sounded the seas to disprove the 
existence of a Creator, has turned its attention to human 
society, and has found a place on this planet ten miles 
square where a decent man can live in decency, comfort, 
and security, supporting and educating his children un- 
spoiled and unpolluted; a place where age is reverenced, 
infancy protected, manhood respected, womanhood hon- 
ored, and human life held in due regard — when skeptics 
can find such a place ten miles square on this globe, where 
the gospel of Christ has not gone and cleared the way, 
and laid the foundations and made decency and security 
possible, it will be in order for the skeptical literati to 
move thither and then ventilate their views." — James Rus- 
sell Lowell. 



14 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

surface the darkness seems to equal the light, and 
yet it is but the shadow of our planet, which di- 
minishes and dwindles as it passes out from the 
sun until it vanishes, and the light passes beyond 
it to meet the light of other suns. Jakob Boehme 
says that the planets, as God made them at the 
first, cast no shadow, and darkness was not. 
The shadow, he says, came with sin, and is part 
of the anguish from which creation is to be re- 
deemed. 

We are equally liable to be misled in our judg- 
ment of the relative extent of spiritual light and 
darkness. In our less hopeful moods we are dis- 
posed to think that moral evil exceeds goodness 
in our world's life, and sin is more abundant than 
the grace which is fighting against it. We even 
incline to think it always must be so in this world 
of ours. Here also we need to be lifted above our 
common level, to get the right position for a judg- 
ment. That position is by the riven tomb of the 
risen Saviour. His rising again from the dead 
is the symbol, and more than the symbol, of his 
triumph over the powers of spiritual darkness. It 
is the proclamation that life is mightier than death, 
good than evil, grace than sin. It is the earnest 
and the prophecy of the final and substantial vic- 
tor}- of the kingdom of light over all antagonistic 
influences. Without it. hope would have to be 



LIGHT 15 

struck from the list of the Christian virtues, as 
having no basis- in truth and reality, and as being 
but a make-believe. 

In our age, Christian hope has arrayed against 
it the pessimism which is almost the intellectual 
atmosphere of the time, and which seduces us into 
an unchristian estimate of the worth of human 
life and its outlook on the future. It proclaims 
that man is a contemptible creature, governed 
only by the lowest motives, and perennially ca- 
pable of lawless crime, as well as of selfish cow- 
ardice. It echoes Satan's estimate of us, "All that 
a man hath he will give for his life" — a lie which 
is contradicted on every page of human history. 
To escape this insidious anti-gospel, we must re- 
member how poorly placed we are for a true esti- 
mate of the spiritual facts, and how much more 
readily we come into knowledge of the evil in life 
than of its good. We must have faith, in spite of 
any appearances to the contrary, that the good 
cause is forever advancing, that grace is always 
gaining ground upon sin and will "yet more 
abound," and that the light is vaster and mightier 
than the darkness. For that is involved in our 
faith in our Lord and Master, the Light of the 
world, the conquering King, who is subjecting 
all things to himself. 



II 
LIFE 



CHAPTER II 



LIFE 



The things which we are most familiar with 
and which lie the nearest to us, are generally those 
we find the hardest to define ; that is, to state the 
class they belong to, and how they differ from 
other things of that class. What, for instance, 
is life ? We look to science for an answer, and we 
get no better than a relative definition. We are 
told that life is sensitiveness to environment. The 
dead body has lost that sensitiveness. The sun 
shines on it without heating it. The cold wind 
blows upon it without adding to its chill. No 
strange sound avails to awaken it to attention. It 
is irresponsive to all that is round it; and this is 
death, as its power to respond was life. 

Although the definition is superficial, it is not 
worthless. It answers, after a fashion, to some of 
the uses of the word in the Scriptures, where life 
is spoken of relatively. We are made "alive 
unto God in Jesus Christ/' when the Son makes 
l the Father more real to us, so that this greatest 
of all the facts in our environment enters into our 
experience, and ceases to be a notion of the mind. 

19 



20 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

Natural life having so much that is mysterious 
about it, we may expect spiritual life to be a mys- 
tery. But the one mystery casts light upon the 
other, especially through their resemblances. 

I. Prof. Drummond emphasizes the fact that 
life is derivable only from life. The spontaneous 
generation of a living being from dead matter is 
unknown to science, although some have believed 
it possible, and a very few have claimed that they 
witnessed it. In all such cases we have reason to 
believe that the difficult task of eliminating living 
germs from the substances in which the experi- 
ment was made was not complete. In the latest of 
them, the evidences that life resulted are too faint 
and feeble for even a materialist to pin his faith 
to, however anxious he might be to believe this. 
That this spontaneous and natural transition from 
dead matter to the living organism, without the 
intervention of any living agency, creative or gen- 
erative, is necessary to complete the materialist 
theory of the world as it stands, is warrant enough 
for us to exact the most decisive proofs from those 
who tell us they have observed such a transition.* 

* Professor Tyndall, in his Belfast Address (1874), de- 
clared that matter possessed the promise and the potency 
of all forms of existence. But he rejected every alleged 
instance of spontaneous generation of life, as do almost 
all the thinkers of his school. Haeckel is the notable 
exception. 



LIFE 21 

The transition from the dead to the living, from 
the inorganic to the organic world, cannot be 
traced to any operation of dead forces. It must 
have had its commencement in a creative act, 
which made a new beginning. The existence of 
life in even its humblest forms implies a living 
Creator, shaping his works in an increasing like- 
ness to himself. Life is a perpetual challenge to 
the materialist, for the forces his theory recog- 
nizes and implies would have left the world with 
no higher organization than the rock crystal. 

A still more direct challenge is found in the 
presence of moral life in the human species, with 
its sense of right and wrong, of duty and of sin. 
As Professor Huxley said in his "Romanes Lec- 
ture on Evolution and Ethics'' (1893), nature 
knows nothing of right and wrong, and has no 
place for ethical distinctions. Their origin must 
be sought elsewhere. That they are real, implies 
the activity of a creative will, which has raised 
our race to an honor above the beasts, and has 
clothed us with a dignity and a responsibility 
which are supernatural. In making this conces- 
sion, the author of "Man's Place in Nature" 
(1863), admitted that man has a place above na- 
ture, of which natural science can give us no ac- 
count. 

II. This is as true of the restoration of life as 



22 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

of its inception. That the race of men came down 
from the first level of their created dignity by a 
fall or apostasy, which has implanted what Kant 
calls "a radical evil in human nature/' is the teach- 
ing both of the Bible and of manifold Gentile tra- 
ditions. It is peculiar to the Bible that it shows 
that God did not consent that this fall should be 
the law of human life, but undertook to retrieve 
it by renewing the spiritual life of mankind. 
Here again there was a new beginning, through 
the birth of a divine life into the world in the in- 
carnation of the Son of God. Our divine Lord is 
a new vital force added to the spiritual resources 
of the world. We cannot resolve this force into 
any felicitous combination of elements already 
existing in human history. Skeptical historians 
and critics have attempted again and again to 
show that nothing radically different from the 
previous course of affairs took place in Palestine 
at the beginning of the Christian Era, that Jesus 
was a happy blending of Hebraic and Hellenic 
elements into a novel combination, that the facts 
as to his life and his acts have been obscured by 
wondering disciples, and so forth. After all these 
efforts, he stands out against the background of 
the world's history as a unique and original spirit- 
ual fact, a "new thing" which was added to the 
spiritual forces of the world at the opening of that 



LIFE 23 

era from which the greatest peoples count their 
years. If the whole New Testament were annihi- 
lated, or had never been written, the reach and the 
scope of the influence he exerted upon men of his 
own age and of every age since his ascension, 
would present to the unbelieving critic just the 
same puzzle as they now have to solve. It is 
through the existence of the apostolic records that 
we and they are furnished with the only key to 
that puzzle. They tell us that the new life that 
dawned upon the world came from the life of the 
Son of God, who came that we "may have life, 
and may have it abundantly." 

Parallel with the redemption of the race is the 
regeneration of the individual. The deadness and 
insensitiveness to spiritual facts which sin has 
produced in us not only has no remedy in nature, 
but is itself of the nature of a "law of sin and 
death," by which we are sunk farther and farther 
in evil through the evil already admitted into our 
wills. It is a law of reaping as we have sowed, 
by which ever-increasing harvests of wrong are 
gathered in our experience. Science, philosophy, 
and the world offer us no remedy for this. They 
speak only of the certainty that every cause will 
work on to its natural effects, and every reaping 
must be after the fashion of the sowing. They 
may bring us alleviations, but no cure. Apart 



24 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

from the gospel of Jesus Christ there is not the 
smallest reason for us to expect that any bad 
man will ever become a good one, or that the 
canker of sin will ever cease to gnaw into the life 
it has once attacked. Nothing less than the im- 
partation of a new life will suffice to stop the pro- 
cesses of spiritual destruction already begun in 
us, and to make us so alive unto God that we shall 
live in holy obedience to his laws, and in the en- 
joyment of his peace. For the individual man as 
for the race, it is life from life. 

III. Life is the great unifier. It builds 
up its organisms by gathering into one 
the lifeless particles of inorganic matter, and 
shaping these into tissues and organs which no 
skill of human manipulation can reproduce. 
Whether in vegetable or animal form, it effects 
combinations which cannot be repeated by the 
most skillful mechanisms or chemical manipula- 
tions. We recognize its products as standing 
apart from all that are not the result of the play 
of vital force, and as constituting unities of a 
higher order than either physics or chemistry can 
furnish. 

Henry Brooke, in his curious book, "The Fool 
of Quality" (1760-1777), has an admirable state- 
ment of this truth : — 

"Every particle of matter has a self, or distinct 



LIFE 25 

entity, inasmuch as it cannot be any other particle 
of matter. Now while it continues in this state of 
selfishness, or absolute distinction, it is utterly 
useless and insignificant, and is to the universe as 
though it were not. But when the divine In- 
telligence hath harmonized certain qualities of 
such distinct particles into certain animal or vege- 
table systems, each yields up its powers for the 
benefit of the whole, and then and then only be- 
comes capable and productive of shape, coloring, 
beauty — flowers, fragrance, and fruits. This 
operation in matter is no other than a manifesta- 
tion of a like process in mind; and no soul ever 
was capable of any degree of virtue or happiness 
save so far as it was drawn away in its affections 
from self ; save so far as it is engaged in wishing, 
contriving, endeavoring, promoting, and rejoic- 
ing in the welfare and happiness of others." 

So long as man stands aloof in the isolation of 
a spiritual atom, with his thoughts all centering 
in himself, under the influence either of his selfish 
propensities, or his more selfish pharisaic pride, 
he is spiritually dead. When he is got off his 
own center, is brought under the influence of a 
life that lies beyond himself, and finds a center 
which is not in himself, he comes to life, and 
through that life is bound to his fellowmen. 

Our Lord did not come into the world merely 



26 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

to save individual sinners from their sins, and to 
fit them for heaven. He came to set up a king- 
dom or order of human life under an unseen 
King, in which men should live in more natural 
and human relations with each other than ever 
before. This kingdom finds its highest expres- 
sion in his church, but it embraces the family 
and the nation in its scope, as institutions divinely 
established for the welfare of mankind. It brings 
to these the "life that working strongly binds" 
man to man more closely than ever before. 

(a) He has made the family a new thing 
within the sphere of his influence, abolishing 
polygamy, lifting the wife to her rightful place 
of honor, purifying the affections and refining the 
manners of all Christian households. He has 
turned the hearts of the fathers to the children 
and of the children to the fathers, emancipating 
the child from the virtual slavery of the old order 
and securing him the rights of a human being. 

(&) His influence upon the life of the Christian 
state has been less fully recognized, as being less 
palpable, though not less real. Outside of 
Christendom there is little sense of the brother- 
hood which binds a nation in one, so that all the 
members suffer when one is wronged or prostrated 
by disaster. Mr. J. Talboys Wheeler, in his 
"Short History of India" (1880), describing the 



LIFE 2j 

apathy with which the natives regarded the hor- 
rors of the Black Hole of Calcutta (1756), re- 
marks : "This utter want of political ties among 
the masses of India is the cause of their depres- 
sion. Individually, they are the kindest and most 
compassionate people in the world, but outside 
their own little circle of family or caste they are 
utterly heedless of what is going on. Within the 
last few years there has been a change for the bet- 
ter; the famines have enlarged their sympathies, 
and the political future of the Hindu people is 
more hopeful now than at any former period of 
their history." It has been through two hundred 
years of contact with Christian ideas that they 
have changed for the better, and have begun to 
realize that they have a share in the sufferings 
of their countrymen. 

So the awakening of China to this sense has 
found expression in a general refusal to have any 
dealings with our own country, because of the in- 
dignities to which their countrymen have been 
subjected in visiting America. The leaders in this 
movement are those who have imbibed Christian 
ideas on the subject through an education in west- 
ern science and literature, and who have become 
editors of the popular newspapers of the coun- 
try. They are bringing the hundreds of millions 
of Chinamen to feel that they are wronged in 



28 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

every wrong inflicted upon a countryman of 
theirs, as they are one body politic. 

It is especially in Christian nations that this 
feeling has the largest scope and finds the fullest 
expression. Through it a new stage of political 
development has been reached, in which the whole 
strength and power of the state is brought to bear 
in defense of the rights of the humblest citizen. 
The Christian state has become the organized 
unselfishness of the whole people for the protec- 
tion of every member of the body politic. Nor 
does it stop with the assertion and maintenance of 
rights. As Mazzini well says, nations do not ex- 
ist by the maintenance of rights merely, but 
through heroism, and through self-sacrifice. It 
is through their citizens being willing to "go the 
second mile" that they maintain their existence 
and their authority. Their history is the story 
of great deeds done for the common weal, where 
mere rights were not at stake. 

(c) In what might be called the biological pas- 
sages of his epistles (Romans xii:4~9; I Corin- 
thians xii : 1 2-30 ; Ephesians iii : 6 ; i v : 4- 1 6 ; 
Colossians i : 17-24; ii : 18, 19; iii : 15), the apostle 
Paul applies this principle to the church, and illus- 
trates the nature of our fellowship with our Head 
and with each other from comparison with the 
human body. It is his favorite form of 



LIFE 29 

declaring that our Lord came to establish a king- 
dom among men, and he anticipates modern 
sociologists in the use of this analogy to explain 
the social unities and functions. "We, who are 
many, are one body in Christ, and severally mem- 
bers one of another/' 

IV. Growth is a characteristic of life. Dead 
things never grow. They may enlarge by the ac- 
cretion of dead particles, as do the stalactites in a 
lime cave; but these particles have no organic 
unity, so that none of them renders any service to 
the whole, er fills any place which the rest could 
not. A tree adds to its bulk year by year, by add- 
ing each year a fresh layer of woody fiber to its 
trunk, and by extending its old branches and put- 
ting forth new. These additions are parts of its 
organism, and sharers of its fortunes as an or- 
ganism. With its decay, they would show a 
diminished vitality, and with its death they would 
die. It is only the living tree that goes on adding 
to its bulk. 

So in the spiritual life : its reality is shown by 
its growth. In a memorable passage of his 
"Apologia pro Vita Sua" (1864), the late Cardi- 
nal Newman says: "The writer to whom 
(humanly speaking) I owe my soul was Thomas 
Scott of Aston-Sandford ... I used almost as 
proverbs what I considered the scope and issue of 



30 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

his doctrine, 'Holiness before peace/ and 
'Growth, the only evidence of life.' ' The dis- 
position in Thomas Scott's time was to rest the 
proof of the possession of the Christian life upon 
a single experience, called "a hopeful work of 
grace." He justly insisted that this can be no more 
than the first step in Christian living, and that 
"growth in grace" is the demand of the gospel, 
equally with repentance unto life, and personal ac- 
quaintance with God. Dr. Trumbull tells of 
hearing a man say, "All my class is converted 
now, and I look upon my work as done." It had 
but begun, for the training of those young Chris- 
tians all lay before him. So we see now, for we 
all agree with Thomas Scott, that real life will 
find its expression in growth. 

We all, indeed, are growing inwardly as well as 
outwardly, but, as Henry Ward Beecher says, it 
is of great importance to observe what it is that 
grows most in us. Is it our intimacy with God, 
or the affairs and pleasures of the world? 
Is it our vision of what lies on a level with our 
eyes, or of what lies above that level? Is it the 
interest in the things that we must leave behind us 
at death, or in what we can carry into the life 
beyond death? 

V. Along with growth goes continuity. The 
tree is the same tree year after year, and even 



LIFE 31 

century after century. The big redwood on the 
slopes of the Sierras carries on its inner layers the 
brand left by a fire before the days of King Solo- 
mon; and it is just the same tree that then spread 
its branches over the remote ancestors of the bears 
and coyotes which range those mountains to-day. 
It is the longest-lived of all the living things 
known to us, but it has not lost its organic identity 
through the lapse of millenniums. 

So with our bodily life. We do not leave it 
behind us, whatever the changes it undergoes. It 
may be that every physical particle which once 
constituted the body has been eliminated and re- 
placed by another. Yet it retains the same char- 
acter throughout all changes. We carry to our 
graves the scars of injuries we received in early 
infancy. Our hair retains the same hue, our eyes 
the same color, our faces the same physiognomy, 
as when we were children. Our photographs 
taken at different ages show marked resemblances, 
along with the differences the years have brought 
us. 

So of our inward life: we are still the same 
selves that we were when we first "found our- 
selves," as conscious human beings. We lose 
nothing of our identity with the lapse of years. 
When I was a small boy, I threw a stone at a 
robin redbreast, and broke its leg. I was ashamed 



32 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

of it then ; I am ashamed of it now. Although I 
believe it has been forgiven me by the Maker of 
the robin, I shall never forget the wanton cruelty 
of the act. It has kept me from doing anything 
that would hurt a bird during the years which 
have elapsed since then. I know it was I who 
did it; that I was, and am, the small white- 
headed scamp who picked up that stone and flung 
it with all his might, and — for once — did not 
miss the mark. So of many a worse act or neg- 
lect in the intervening years : I am the one 
who did or omitted to do these things, and 
never can I escape the identity or the respon- 
sibility. 

"Upon me lies a burden w T hich I cannot shift/' 
says Frederick Maurice, "upon any other human 
creature — the burden of duties unfulfilled, words 
unspoken, or spoken violently and untruly; of 
holy relationships neglected; of days wasted for- 
ever; of evil thoughts once cherished, which are 
ever appearing as fresh as when they were first ad- 
mitted into the heart; of talents cast away; of 
affections in myself or in others trifled with; of 
light within turned to darkness. So speaks the 
conscience; so speaks or has spoken the con- 
science of each man." 

It is just this unbroken identity which is the 
most terrible fact of an evil life, as it is the basis 



LIFE 33 

of the remorse which darkens its present, and 
may forever darken its future, with despair. 
Memory is terribly faithful in its record of evil 
things ; how faithful has been shown to some at 
moments of extreme peril, when the whole past, 
with all its details, has been flashed as in an in- 
stant upon their mental vision. It is from such 
experiences that we come to understand the state- 
ment that when the dead stand before God, there 
will be an opening of the book for each of the 
human race, and that the dead will be judged out 
of the things which are written in the books 
(Revelation xx:i2). Unless there be some 
cleansing power which can efface the dreadful 
records kept by the heart, then a future of re- 
morse and misery is all that is possible to every 
one who has defiled his conscience with sin. "If 
we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have 
fellowship one with another, and the blood of 
Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin. If we 
say that we have no sin we deceive ourselves, 
and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, 
he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins, 
and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (I 
John i : 7-9). Without that cleansing, there is no 
gospel for men. 

There is, however, a joyful side to this truth of 
the continuity of life — it is that we need leave 



34 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

nothing behind us that is worth taking along with 
us. It is, indeed, our duty and our right to lay 
aside the limitations which cramp each age of life, 
and yet to carry with us all that belongs to the 
strength and the insight of that age. The apostle 
says that when he became a man, he put away 
what was childish ; but he did not lay aside what 
was childlike in his nature. The true Christian, 
whatever his years or his experience, never ceases 
to be a child in all the qualities which bring the 
child near to the gate of the kingdom. Our Lord 
told Nicodemus that to b' born anew (or from 
above) is the prerequisite for entering the king- 
dom (John iii : 3, 5) ; and he told the apostles that 
"whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God 
as a little child, he shall in no wise enter therein" 
(Luke xviii : 17). The birth from above renews 
us into childlikeness, just as we were born into 
natural childhood by natural birth. And to em- 
phasize the relation, he set a little child in the 
midst w T hen he set forth the nature of regenera- 
tion. 

Some people have been puzzled to see how 
children are saved. The gospel says the difficulty 
lies in getting grown people to become children 
for their salvation. To do that, they must lay 
aside their hard worldly wisdom ; their dullness in 
the sense of right and wrong; their fretting about 



LIFE 35 

to-morrow; their lack of simple dependence upon 
our Father in heaven; their unreadiness to trust 
him for the grandest things he promises; their 
want of any sense of the wonder in the world and 
in life; their resentful malice toward those who 
have injured them. Our Lord himself, in his 
growth into manhood, left nothing behind him 
that belonged to a perfect child. It would have 
been better if the revisers had left untouched the 
passage in which the church speaks to the Father 
of "thy holy Child Jesus" (Acts iv:3o), for 
while the Greek word has also the sense of 
"servant/' yet its primary meaning cannot have 
been far from the thought of the apostle. 

Wordsworth, the first modern poet who has 
opened the book of childhood to us, gives expres- 
sion to the Christian idea : — 

My heart leaps up when I behold 

A rainbow in the sky: 
So was it when my life began ; 
So is it now I am a man; 
So be it when I shall grow old, 

Or let me die! 
And I could wish my days to be 
Bound each to each in natural piety. 

VI. Nature, to a superficial view, seems to fore- 
tell death as the end of life. The living thing 
dies and passes away in the dissolution of the 



36 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

organism into its elements; the dead thing alone 
remains the same. 

Nature, however, abounds in intimations that 
life may pass through and survive deathlike 
changes, which open upon another and a nobler ex- 
istence. One of these is the transformation which 
insects undergo in passing from the chrysalis 
stage of their existence to that in which they at- 
tain the full growth and freedom. This trans- 
formation helped the Greeks at least to believe in 
a life after death. They gave the name Psyche 
(soul) to the butterfly, because they saw in its 
passage from a creeping grub to a flying thing a 
parable and prophecy of the change death would 
work upon themselves. 

Mrs. Alfred Gatty, in one of her beautiful 
parables of nature, takes as an instance the 
larva of the dragon fly, whose life is spent under 
water until he is overtaken by languor and pain, 
and is driven to climb the stalk of some water- 
plant toward the surface. His kindred follow 
him with pity and sympathy, and think of him as 
lost and gone, when he emerges from his shell, 
and changes into a swift and strong master of 
flight, whose "four gauzy pinions flash back the 
sunshine." Nor can he return to the state in 
which he had lived, to explain to his brothers the 
change he has undergone. They go on mourning 



LIFE 37 

his loss, while the empty shell that had contained 
him clings to the stem by which he had climbed. 

In other cases the larva buries itself in the earth 
when the period of change approaches, and rises 
from its grave to the higher existence. Mrs. 
Trumbull-Slosson makes a beautiful use of this 
in one of the stories of her "Seven Dreamers." 

While there is no simple organism which does 
not look forward to the change we call death, 
there are complex organisms, each with a life of its 
own, whose nature implies immortality. The 
nation is one of these, and the church is another. 

Some theorists have run the parallel so far be- 
tween the life of the individual man and that of the 
nation as to predict a time of necessary decay and 
a final death for every one of them. Nations, 
however, die only by suicide, through a general 
selfishness displacing public spirit, and the love 
of country perishing out of the hearts of the peo- 
ple. History, as Dr. Elisha Mulford, in his great 
book on "The Nation," says, is not a series of 
funerals. England has seen a thousand years of 
national life, and is as full of vitality as at any 
earlier stage of her existence. 

The church also is a deathless organization. 
She came into existence when Peter, in the name of 
the Twelve, uttered the great confession; and in 
that moment our Lord pronounced the grand 



38 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

promise that the gates of Hades, the power of 
death, should never prevail against her. At times, 
she has seemed to fall into a sleep that might have 
proved deadly ; but always she was quickened into 
a fresh life by the indwelling Spirit, roused to a 
new sense of the work she had to do for God, and 
equipped with new instruments to do it, in the per- 
sons of prophets and reformers, preachers and 
singers. So she lives on through the ages, an 
immortal organization, with part of her member- 
ship in this world of conflict, and part in the 
world of triumph beyond death, but all gathered 
under the one Head which is Christ (Ephesians 
i: 10), 



Ill 
SHEEP 



CHAPTER III 



SHEEP 



The Bible has more to say about sheep than any 
other animal. There were no cats in Palestine, 
and the dogs were outcasts. Horses were very 
few and exotic. Asses, sheep, and oxen were the 
domestic animals, and of the three the sheep were 
by far the most numerous, and came closest to 
man. The way in which the prophet Nathati 
speaks of the poor man's ewe lamb, which "grew 
up together with him, and his children/' and 
which "did eat of his own morsel, and drank of 
his own cup, and lay in his bosom," is an indica- 
tion that sheep were household pets in the place 
now filled by cats, dogs, and other animals. The 
apostle Paul, indeed, never mentions either sheep 
or shepherds ; but he was born and brought up in 
Cilicia, where goats took the place of sheep, and 
where he was taught to make tents from the coarse 
cloth made from goats' hair. 

The sheep played a very important part in the 
history and discipline of the elect people. From 
the time of Abel down to the giving of the law at 
Mount Sinai, the keeping of sheep was their work. 

41 



42 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

When any of them turned aside from this to till- 
age of the soil, trouble always followed. So it 
came upon Noah, after he made his vineyard ; and 
on Jacob, after he built his house on the parcel of 
ground he bought in Shechem. Through those 
centuries, whether spent in Palestine or in Egypt, 
the Hebrews were shepherds and nothing else, de- 
pending upon the animal which supplied them 
with both food and clothing, and for whose sup- 
port they must move from place to place in most 
of the localities where they sought a home. Even 
when they obtained possession of their own coun- 
try, and became a people of city-dwellers, with 
fields and vineyards of their own, the care of 
sheep remained a chief industry. The tribes who 
settled beyond Jordan had no other employment; 
and as much of the hill country of Judaea was unfit 
for tillage, but supplied grazing for sheep and 
goats, the majority of the people even west of the 
Jordan seem to have been sheep-owners, if not 
shepherds. 

There was a wise purpose in this. The keep- 
ing of sheep exercises a refining influence upon 
character. The life of the hunter, which Esau 
preferred to it, tends to make men savage and 
cruel. The shepherd's work teaches them to be 
humane and kindly. He who is to live by sheep 
must care for sheep. He must keep them on his 



SHEEP 43 

mind at all times, as their protector against wild 
beasts, and their provider, to lead them to the 
green pastures and the still waters. In more 
northern countries he must plan to protect them 
against sudden storms, and burial under the snow- 
drifts. It is well known, The London Times once 
said, that those who invest in sheep simply to make 
money out of them are sure to lose money. They 
must have another motive if they are to get on 
with them, or at least they must employ as shep- 
herds those who have that motive, and who will 
be always planning for the sheep, often against 
the indifference of the owner.* The mere hire- 
ling, who does not make the sheep his own in his 
interest in them, is useless in every way. 

The calamity of America before Columbus was 
that it had no sheep, except one wild and un- 
tamable species of mountain sheep. Not only 
was the refining influence of the shepherd's life 
wanting to the aborigines, but they had nothing to 
carry them over the transition from the life of the 
savage hunter to that of the settled farmer. When 



* It illustrated this from the experience of those who 
employed convicts on the big Australian sheep-walks. The 
pickpockets made the best shepherds, because they had been 
accustomed to watch closely those they meant to rob. Men 
of better education, who had been transported for forgery 
and similar crimes, were of no use at all. 



44 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

General Miles, in 1886, brought the hitherto un- 
tamable Apaches to terms, he secured for them 
from the national Government a supply of sheep 
and cattle. They soon became shepherds and 
cowboys, and never went on the warpath again. 

God had a further purpose in keeping his 
people to the work of the shepherd. It enabled 
them to understand better his own relation to 
them, as their Shepherd. Just as they had to 
keep on their minds the flock of silly sheep they 
tended, so he was caring for them, providing for 
their wants, defending them against their enemies, 
and showing them his goodness through all their 
lives. He was teaching them to say, "The Lord 
is my shepherd," and to recognize him as "the 
Shepherd of Israel," as well as of each single soul 
among them. That is the meaning of that won- 
derful Twenty-third Psalm, in which the shep- 
herd's care of his sheep is recognized as a parable 
of God's care of his people. Alongside it stands 
the tenth chapter of the Gospel according to 
John, in which our Lord takes the place of the 
Jehovah of the Old Testament as the Shepherd of 
the spirits of men. 

It is, however, not the shepherd, but the sheep, 
that is my subject. There are points about this 
animal which are suggestive, in connection with 
the use made of it in Bible teaching. 



SHEEP 45 

I. The sheep is a mountain animal. Man has 
brought it down to the plains for his convenience ; 
but it belongs to the hills, and it acquired its habits 
there. Its thick fleece was given it as its de- 
fense against the cold winds of the hills. It still 
shows an instinct to seek the hills. If you turn a 
number of lambs loose in a field, which has a 
hillock in it, they will make for that hillock, and 
fight each other for possession of it, and find hap- 
piness in perching on it. The mountaineering 
habits of their remote ancestors find vent in this. 

As God's sheep we also belong to the hills. We 
are native to a higher level than that on which we 
find ourselves, and all that is best in us yearns for 
that level. In our noblest moments we have 
glimpses of it, and we know that there the pulse 
beats more strongly, and we breathe quicker and 
more joyfully, than in the damps and mists of the 
lower plains of life. Like the lambs, we climb 
joyfully any petty hillock that suggests our right- 
ful height. Even our worldly ambitions are often 
an expression of our restlessnesss on the plains, 
and our eagerness for what corresponds to our 
origin on the heights, however mistaken the means 
we use for this. 

II. As the sheep comes from a level on which 
mud and mire are unknown, it is a clean animal. 
On the plains it often falls into the mire, but it 



46 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

never stays in it. It always struggles to be out 
of it and to be clean again. The pig belongs to 
the lower level, and has no dislike to mud and 
mire. It enjoys them, and returns to its wallow- 
ing, if you clean it (II Peter ii: 22). 

As God's sheep we yearn for cleanness. We 
also may fall into the mire of sin and uncleanness, 
but we find no rest there. We struggle to get out 
of the filth, and long to be clean again, as did 
David, when he wrote the Fifty-first Psalm : — 

Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: 
Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. 

He was badly defiled when he wrote that, hav- 
ing fallen into two of the worst sins a man can be 
guilty of. But by the help of God's Spirit he was 
taught the way and the speech of a true repent- 
ance, and has been teaching these to the world 
ever since. An American poet, the Rev. John B. 
Tabb, gives expression to this truth in a poem he 
calls "The Difference" :— 

Unc' Si, de Holy Bible say, 

In speakin' ob de jus', 
Dat he do fall sebben times a day: 

Now, how's de sinner wuss? 

Well, chile, de slip may come to all; 

But den de diffe'nce foller, — 
For ef you watch him when he fall, 

De jus' man do not waller. 



SHEEP 47 

III. The sheep, as a mountain animal, found 
safety on those craggy heights, and escaped from 
its foes by the swiftness of its leap from rock to 
rock. When brought down to the plains it leaves 
behind it its means of safety, and becomes the most 
helpless and defenseless of animals. It has 
almost no courage, no means of swift flight, and 
generally no weapon of defense. It must find its 
safety in the shepherd's care for it ; and he must be 
one who takes all the risks for it, even to laying 
down his life for it if need arise. 

God does not pay us the compliment of saying 
we are either wise or resourceful, when he calls us 
his sheep. He knows we are always in peril on 
the lower levels of life, and must lift up our eyes 
to the hills to seek our safety. We must find it in 
him who came down to take us into his care, and to 
lay down his life for his sheep. 

"Of all the sheep that are fed on earth," says 
Frederick Pease, "Christ's sheep are the most 
simple. Always losing themselves; doing little 
else in this world but lose themselves ; never find- 
ing themselves ; always found by Some One else ; 
getting perpetually into sloughs, and snows, and 
bramble thickets; like to die there, but for their 
Shepherd, who is forever finding them and bear- 
ing them back, with torn fleeces, and eyes full of 
fear." 



48 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

IV. It was from the heights that the sheep 
brought the habit of following its leader. On the 
hills the leader must see for all, and if any do not 
jump where he does, they are likely to go headlong 
down some chasm. So if you hold a stick before 
the bellwether, and make him jump it, every sheep 
in the flock will jump when it comes to that spot, 
even though the stick has been taken away. 
"Like a flock of sheep," has become a proverbial 
expression for the way in which a crowd or mob 
of men do just as their leaders do, without any 
thought of their own. A class of little girls were 
asked, "If there are six sheep resting under a wall, 
and one of them gets up and jumps over it, how 
many will be left?" Most of them said there 
would be five left, but one girl, a farmer's daugh- 
ter, said : "There will be none left. If one goes, 
all the rest will follow." 

In those also whom God calls his sheep there is 
the instinct to seek a leader and to follow him. It 
often leads to perverse and foolish choices of a 
leader. It makes us run after quacks and mis- 
leaders, if we have not found the right Master. 
Some sort of master we must have. We were not 
born to be masterless and independent beings. "It 
is always a choice of masters," says Phillips 
Brooks, "to which Christ is urging men. It is not 
by striking off allegiance, but by finding your true 



SHEEP 49 

Lord, and serving him with a complete submis- 
sion, that you escape from slavery." Some one 
we must serve and follow, and we often show it 
by submitting to a yoke which is bondage. "Other 
lords have had dominion over us," because our 
hearts craved the true, wise, liberating leadership 
of the True Shepherd, who goes before his sheep 
and calls them by name. 

But it is to no blind following that he calls men 
as his sheep. They are children of light, and of 
the day, and are called upon to judge of them- 
selves what is right (Luke xii:57). What he 
asks of us is not thoughtless acquiescence in au- 
thority or tradition, but the roused and active ex- 
ercise of our powers of intelligence, in the as- 
surance that the more men think the more they will 
thank — the more they use their powers of discrim- 
ination, the more they will discern the truth of 
his claims to their allegiance. The Scriptures, as 
Coleridge says, distinguish themselves from all 
other books which claim to disclose the mind of 
God to men by the frequency and the urgency with 
which they call upon us to exercise our powers of 
thought, and by their assurance that this will bring 
us not to denial or rejection of the truth, but to 
acceptance of it 



IV 
FOOD 



CHAPTER IV 

FOOD 

In many if not most of the forms of worship 
known to us, food holds a place, through some 
sort of feast being recognized as a symbol of the 
relation between the worshiper and the object of 
his worship. In most cases this is a feast in which 
they both partake, and in which the deity accepts 
the relation of host and protector to his guest, 
with all that belongs to the obligations of hos- 
pitality. He is thus pledged to a perpetual good 
will and helpfulness. Commonly, the matter of 
the feast is a sacrifice, first given to the god and his 
official representatives, and divided among all 
concerned according to recognized rules. An at- 
tempt has been made to explain in this way the 
sacrifices and feasts of the Mosaic system. But 
this is to misconceive the biblical conception of the 
relation of Jehovah to his covenant people. That 
relation is strictly conditioned upon their ob- 
servance of his law, and has nothing of the abso- 
lute character of the obligations existing between 
either kinsman and kinsman, or between host and 
guest. 

In the Mosaic law feasts hold a very outstand- 

53 



54 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

ing place. Three great feasts every year drew the 
people of all parts of the land to the center of the 
nation's worship, but it was in that of the pass- 
over that the people's feeding upon a sacrifice was 
the central fact. It was a symbolic statement of 
the truth that the life of the human spirit is as de- 
pendent upon what it gets from God, as are the 
life, health, and growth of the human body upon 
natural food. Yet there are few passages in the 
Old Testament in which this is brought into clear 
view. In the Thirty-fourth Psalm the exhorta- 
tion is found : — 

Oh taste and see that Jehovah is good: 
Blessed is the man that taketh refuge in him. 

And the prophet Amos (viii: n) says, "Behold, 
the days come, saith the Lord Jehovah, that I will 
send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, 
nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of 
Jehovah." 

It is in the New Testament that not only is food 
used symbolically, but the truth that food in one 
of the great parables of God is insisted upon. It 
is especially in the sixth chapter of the Fourth 
Gospel that our Lord does this, by presenting the 
spiritual reality to which it corresponds. 

But let me observe first of all that our Lord 
seemed to find an especial pleasure in the feasts of 



FOOD 55 

his countrymen, and not only in their solemn reli- 
gious festivals, but in their social feasts, to which 
neighbor invited neighbor. He seems to have 
thought these the most innocent of their social 
usages, and the best fitted to develop in them the 
generosity, the courtesy, and the cheerfulness 
which became the children of the kingdom. While 
the rest of their life was based upon the Mammon- 
ite principle of "nothing for nothing," their feasts 
were given and not purchased, and therefore like 
the grand generosity of their Father in heaven. 
While elsewhere they stood upon their rights, and 
made the most of their claims upon others, those 
who came to a feast in the spirit of it would be 
thinking more of others than of themselves. In 
the fourteenth chapter of the Third Gospel he 
holds up the ideal of feast-making and feast-tak- 
ing, and contrasts with this the self-seeking which 
spoils the feast, the rivalry which would convert 
it into an exchange of favors, and the joyless, 
worldly spirit which would put feasting out of life, 
and would substitute the enjoyment of personal 
possessions in its place. I am not speaking here 
of the spiritual significance of the teachings of 
that chapter, but of their social bearings. 

The next thing we have to notice is that when he 
came to establish the two symbols or sacraments of 
his kingdom, as he took one of them from the 



56 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

purifications of the Old Testament, so he took the 
other from its feasts. In each case, he takes an 
immemorial and almost universal usage, in which 
are employed the simplest elements of our human 
life, and sets them in such new associations, and 
surrounds them with such new sanctities, that they 
become new things to us. He could be original 
without affecting novelty. 

Luther rightly says that the sixth chapter of 
John does not speak of the Lord's Supper, but of 
that of which the Lord's Supper speaks. It pre- 
sents to us the mystery of spiritual nutrition, in 
its parallel to the mystery of natural nutrition. 
For both are mysterious, and not one alone. We 
can trace the steps by which food is digested into 
chyle, and chyle is transformed into blood, and 
blood in its circulation through vein and artery re- 
places the waste caused by every exertion of our 
bodily powers. But to know these steps is not to 
know how the vital force transforms dead sub- 
stance into living tissue. 

How can the mute unconscious bread 

Become the living tongue, 
And nerves, through which our pleasures spread, 

And which by pain are wrung? 

Can lifeless water help to form 

The living, leaping blood, 
Whose gentle flow, in passion's storm 

Becomes a ruffled flood? 



FOOD 57 

Thomas Toke Lynch writes in "The Rivulet." We 
can escape all sense of the wonder in this by dull- 
ness of mind, or through never giving it thought ; 
but otherwise we must feel that we are in the 
presence of a mystery in our daily bread. 

Our Lord in the synagogue of Capernaum in- 
sists on the spiritual process, to which our daily 
bread corresponds. There are three steps in 
his presentation of it: (i) That he, the Son of 
man, can give those who hear him bread which 
will endure unto everlasting life, whereas the 
natural bread perishes in our use of it. (2) 
That he himself is the bread, which comes down 
from heaven for the life of the world. (3) That 
this bread of life is his flesh, and his blood; 
that is, his humanity as the Son of man, 
in which the spirits of men are to find their 
nourishment as spirits, unto a life everlasting. 
It is not his example, or his teaching, or his in- 
fluence, which is the spiritual food of men, but 
himself. It is through a union with him, as 
close and appropriating as that which their bodies 
sustain to their food, that they are nourished 
into spiritual life, health, and growth. 

I. The first point in the parable of food is 
that it teaches us the dependence of man. We 
are not little gods, to stand alone and supply our 
own strength. We are so constructed that our 



58 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

bodies are undergoing a constant destruction 
and renewal. Every act, every thought, every 
emotion, works to the destruction of animal tis- 
sues, leaving an effete matter, which is elimi- 
nated by various organs, and through appropriate 
channels. If this elimination were not accom- 
panied by a replacement of what is lost, we 
should perish of exhaustion. When some or- 
ganic failure makes the replacement impossible 
or insufficient, we waste away through innutri- 
tion, and our bodies die. To our ordinary con- 
sciousness our bodies are permanent solidities. 
They are, however, in a state of flux, like a 
river, whose bed would be left empty if the 
onflow of its waters were not replaced by a con- 
stantly fresh supply. It is from the world with- 
out us and beneath us that we are constantly 
replacing our bodies in the shape of food. 

Unlike our bodies, our spirits are not built up 
of separate particles which can be destroyed and 
replaced. But in their case also, constant nutri- 
tion is required to their true life and growth. 
We live only by the reception of life from the 
Son of man. He is made unto us wisdom, and 
righteousness, and sanctification, and redemp- 
tion, and power, and whatever else our spirits 
call for. We have none of these things of our 
own, but only a capacity to receive them from 



FOOD 59 

the Son of man. From him come our faith to 
grasp, our strength to resist, our wisdom to 
guide our lives. We have these only by our 
incessantly receiving them. 

"To keep the lamp alive 

With oil we fill the bowl; 
Tis water makes the willow thrive, 
And grace that feeds the soul. 

"Man's wisdom is to seek 
His strength in God alone; 
And e'en an angel would be weak 
Who trusted in his own. 

"Retreat beneath his wings, 
And in his grace confide! 
This more exalts the King of kings 
Than all your works beside. 

"In Jesus is our store; 

Grace issues from his throne; 
Whoever says, T want no more/ 
Confesses he has none." 

II. The fact that we are hungry when we 
have not been fed at the usual or right time is 
a part of the parable. Natural hunger is a benefi- 
cent arrangement. The human race would 
perish but for hunger, which impresses upon us 
painfully the necessity of replacing the waste of 
our bodies. Without it we easily might carry 
our abstinence to a point from which there would 
be no recovery. 



60 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

There is the same beneficence in the hunger 
of the human spirit for God. We can still and 
silence it for a time. The prodigal did so, when 
he was busy w T ith his waste of his substance; 
but there arose a mighty famine in that land, 
and it reached him as well as others. He flew 
for help to man, and found only degradation 
and disappointment. He envied the very swine 
their fullness and their satisfaction, but could not 
share it. He could not, because he was a son, 
with a father's house in the distance, and plenty 
of bread for him there if he would seek it. When 
he came to himself, after being beside himself, 
that is insane, he did seek it, and found it. 

The essential misery and unrest of a godless 
life is but the hunger of a disinherited spirit for 
the bread at the Father's table. Even the par- 
oxysms of men's sinning are, sometimes at least, 
proof of their failure to find true satisfaction 
in life. It is our grandeur, as it is our pain, 
that our hearts are too large for the whole world 
to fill them, and that only the bread that comes 
down from heaven for the life of the world can 
do so. As Carl Spencer says : — 

Whoso the downward paths hath trod, 
The wrecks of human life to scan, 
Must write, "This creature, being man, 

Was ruined having less than God." 






FOOD 61 

But hunger is not always the paroxysm of 
starvation. It is the daily and pleasant experi- 
ence of wholesome natures. The saint hungers 
after God as well as the sinner, but with no 
despairing anguish. It is the preparation for 
a fresh enjoyment of what is always within 
the reach of his faith. And as the absence 
of natural hunger before we partake of food 
is a proof of inferior vitality, so is it in the 
spiritual life. "Blessed are they that hunger 
and thirst after righteousness: for they shall 
be filled." On the other hand, there is a 
false satiety, a self-satisfaction with what we 
are, which was the sin of the Pharisees: 
"Woe unto you, ye that are full! for ye shall 
hunger." 

III. This parable of nutrition is like all the 
rest in that it does not "walk on all fours." The 
correspondence between the two kinds is not com- 
plete and absolute. The body is nourished on 
what is lower than itself, and accomplishes this 
by assimilating its food to itself. We use for 
this only impersonal, selfless things, which we 
may treat as means to our ends. The horror of 
cannibalism is common to all races which have 
risen to the point of discerning what human per- 
sonality means, and grows out of the fact that 
the victim is a personal self equally with us. 



62 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

Those races which ascribe selfhood to animals 
have a horror of eating them. 

The human spirit, on the contrary, feeds only 
upon what is above itself; but by the law that 
the higher assimilates the lower, it is assimilated 
to its food. "He that eateth my flesh," says the 
Saviour, "and drinketh my blood hath eternal 
life; and I will raise him up at the last day . . . 
He . . . abideth in me, and I in him. As the 
living Father sent me, and I live because of the 
Father ; so he that eateth me, he also shall live be- 
cause of me/' This great saying has been fulfilled 
in millions of lives, in that they have been fed, 
nourished, and comforted out of this one life. We 
can see in a wooden fashion what the intercourse 
between man and man may attain to. We have 
glimpses of the possibility of two human spirits 
almost transcending the limits which inclose per- 
sonality, and living in and for each other. Jesus 
calmly says, "Abide in me, and I in you!" and 
although we know not what it means or how it 
is possible, we discover that it is the most real of 
human experiences. 

IV. With the exception of a few savage races, 
mankind are agreed in making mealtimes occa- 
sions of social reunion, of at least the family. It 
has been shown that our Saviour gave his ap- 
proval to this aspect of the social life of Judaea, in 



FOOD 63 

his presence at their feasts, his suggesting the 
finest way of keeping them, and his use of them in 
his parables as symbols of the kingdom of God. 
So in the second great sacrament of the church, he 
bids his people come together for a social feast, 
and every direction he gives with regard to its 
proper observance is addressed to them in 
the plural. "Take, eat . . . Do this in re- 
membrance of me . . . Drink ye all of it." 
He speaks to them as a Christian congregation, 
and the apostle quotes to the congregation in 
Corinth those very directions, as applying to them 
also. Not one person present at the supper is 
treated as having no share or interest in it, and 
its observance by one or two communicants in the 
presence of a congregation is a palpable subver- 
sion of its meaning and purpose. 

To eat with any one implies good feeling 
toward him, according to the usage of the East, 
in which the Bible was written. The Psalmist 
(Psalm xli : 9) , makes his complaint : — 

Yea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, 

Who did eat of my bread, 

Hath lifted up his heel against me. 

Especially the eastern host shows a marked good 
will by singling out a guest, to whom he will give 
some favorite morsel. So our Lord did with 



64 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

Judas, giving him the sop which he had dipped in 
the dish; but on his receiving it, "Satan entered 
into him." 

Both these points are applicable to the Lord's 
Supper. It is a social feast, to be observed by 
all the Christians present, and not by a few. It is 
a feast of charity, to which we are to come in 
good will to all men, and especially those who sit 
at meat with us. It is the Lord's Supper, and he 
is present as the host; and we, in accepting his 
invitation, profess that we believe him our friend, 
and that we are determined to be his friends. He 
is not present "in, with, or under" the elements. 
Neither does he confer in this feast any grace or 
benefit which he withholds at other times and on 
other occasions. The great mystery of eating his 
flesh, and drinking his blood, is not confined to the 
sacrament. It was shared by myriads who lived 
before his Incarnation, as by the Psalmist king, 
who wrote : — 

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine 

enemies : 
Thou hast anointed my head with oil; 
My cup runneth over. 

But the sacrament is an occasion when the 
Lord "keeps tryst" with his people. He never is 
absent when the two or three gather in his name. 



FOOD 65 

But he aims at making us feel and realize his be- 
ing with us at this feast, and he has chosen the 
elements and the acts which will aid us in this. 
Sense weighs heavily against faith at other times, 
even in the worship of God. In this service, it is 
enlisted on the side of faith. The bread and the cup 
are there, and we behold them, knowing that in 
every year since he sat down with the apostles in 
the upper room in Jerusalem, that bread has been 
broken, and that wine poured out, and that he 
has been present with every company of his peo- 
ple who have kept the feast, and has blessed them 
in their reception of it. And that blessing has 
been that, while they ate of the earthly food, their 
spirits were nourished by that which came down 
from heaven for the life of the world. Whatever 
they may have added to the feast as he made it at 
the first, and whatever they may have taken away 
from it, if they have kept the essentials, and have 
looked to him in faith, they have found him 
present, and have fed upon him. 

His presence is not in the elements nor upon 
an altar, but in the Christian congregation. "I 
am in the midst of you." So the right posture 
for the Christian minister is not that which turns 
him away from the people, for in so doing he is 
turning his back upon his divine Master, what- 
ever may be the thing toward which he is turning. 



66 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

The shekinah, the dwelling-place of God, is 
"with men, and he shall dwell with them, and they 
shall be his peoples, and God himself shall be with 
them, and be their God." 









V 
TOUCH 



CHAPTER V 

TOUCH 

"Touch is the sense which love employs." It 
means the annihilation of distance between one 
who loves and that which he loves, so that mere 
nearness is replaced by contact. Our sense of the 
significance of touch finds expression in such 
phrases as "getting into touch," or "living in 
touch" with people. They stand for sympathetic 
contact, the sympathy which seeks contact, and 
does not keep others "at arm's length." Children 
learn it in their mothers' laps, and are never con- 
tent to be merely near those they love without 
actually touching them. 

The Old Testament uses the word "touch" 
mostly in an adverse sense. It stands for an 
aggression of an enemy rather than the approach 
of a friend. It occurs in the many prohibitions of 
contact with unclean things and persons. It is 
one of the forbidding terms of the Mosaic law. 
When the apostle rebukes those who would con- 
vert Christianity into a sort of Judaism, he 
charges them with setting up ordinances, "Handle 
not, nor taste, nor touch" (Colossians ii:2i). 

69 



70 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

The only favorable sense the word has in the 
Hebrew Scriptures is where one in authority- 
touches an inferior to confer power. So in 
Isaiah's vision in the temple, one of the seraphim 
flew to the prophet, and touched his mouth with a 
live coal from the altar. Similarly, Jeremiah tells 
us that "Jehovah put forth his hand, and touched 
my mouth ; and Jehovah said unto me, Behold, I 
have put my words in thy mouth." So Daniel 
says of Gabriel, that "he touched me, and set me 
upright. And he said, Behold, I will make thee 
know what shall be in the latter time of the in- 
dignation." 

The spirit of the new covenant is that of near- 
ness, while that of the old was that of distance. 
The latter laid its emphasis upon the separateness 
of God and man, that it might guard the elect 
people from idolatry, and from the unseemly 
familiarity with God which leads to idolatry and 
even worse things.* Its lesson was the awfulness 

* There is permanent need of both modes of the divine 
disclosure. Through our human frailty we are liable to 
lose sight of the greatness of God, in the sense of his 
nearness and his helpfulness. It has been remarked of 
the Japanese converts to Christianity that they are too apt 
to think of God simply in relation to their own needs, and 
with too little awe of his divine majesty. But, as Mr. 
Jowett of Birmingham says, it is only through communion 
with a great God that men become great Christians. Rev- 



TOUCH 71 

and the transcendence of God; and that truth 
must be learned before the world was prepared to 
enter the next stage of its education, and learn of 
his immanence and his nearness. 

I. The Incarnation opens the new stage, and 
its symbol is the touch by which the Son of God 
expresses his love to men. He "lived in touch" 
with those he came to save. He got as near to 
them as possible, although this shocked many who 
cherished the spirit of separation, from which the 
Pharisees took their sectarian name. They mur- 
mured, saying, "This man receiveth sinners, and 
eateth with them." They said in Jericho, "He is 
gone in to lodge with a man that is a sinner." The 
Pharisee, in whose house the sinful woman 
washed his feet with her tears, said to himself, 
"This man, if he were a prophet, would have per- 
ceived who and what manner of woman this is that 
toucheth him, that she is a sinner." They 

erence lies at the foundation of a godly character, and the 
lack of it is one of the sins of our time. It is of reverence 
(theosebeia) that the apostle writes that it "is profitable 
for all things, having promise of the life which now is, 
and of that which is to come." The word is not found 
in any of his earlier epistles, but it occurs nine times in 
the first to Timothy, and once in the second, and in that 
to Titus. Did this enrichment of his vocabulary grow out 
of experiences among his converts, such as are recorded 
about the new Christians of Japan? 



12 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

thought he was breaking down the distinction 
between good and bad among men, by failing to 
keep the bad "at arm's length," as they did. They 
even suspected his own holiness in seeing the com- 
pany he kept, and applied to him such proverbs as 
"Touch pitch and be defiled ;" "Birds of a feather 
flock together." Nor is it clear that we have the 
right to cast stones at them, for what would we 
have felt when we saw him accepting invitations 
from men whose occupations we thought dis- 
graceful and immoral, and sitting at meat with 
men and women whose characters were un- 
questionably bad? Would we not be afraid of 
compromising our reputations if we did so? 
Would we not talk of lowering the truth, or of 
effacing the line of distinction between us and the 
world? But he let nothing stand between him- 
self and those he was seeking to save. 

II. In the simplest and most literal way he 
ministered by his touch to human needs. When 
Simon's wife's mother lay sick of a great fever, 
"he came and took her by the hand, and raised 
her up; and the fever left her" (Mark i: 
31). When he came to the house of Jairus, the 
ruler of the synagogue, he stopped the noisy 
lamentations over the dead girl, and "taking the 
child by the hand, he saith unto her, Talitha cumi 
. . . Damsel, I say unto thee, Arise. And 



TOUCH 7s 

straightway the damsel rose up, and walked" 
(Mark v: 41, 42). As he left the house of 
Jairus, two blind men besought him to heal them. 
"Then touched he their eyes, saying, According 
to your faith be it done unto you. And their eyes 
were opened" (Matthew ix.:2g). When they 
brought him a deaf and dumb man in the coasts of 
Decapolis, "he took him aside from the multitude 
privately, and put his fingers into his ears . . . 
and touched his tongue . . . and saith unto him, 
Ephphatha, that is, Be opened. And his ears 
were opened and the bound of his tongue was 
loosed, and he spake plain" (Mark vii: 32-35). 
At Bethsaida, a blind man was brought to him, 
"and when he had spit on his eyes, he laid his 
hands upon him," and gave him sight (Mark viii : 
23). As he came down from the Transfigura- 
tion, they brought him the demoniac boy, for 
whom his disciples could do nothing, and the evil 
spirit rent the boy until "the more part said, He 
is dead. And Jesus took him by the hand, and 
raised him up; and he arose" (Mark ix: 26, 27). 
When Peter smote off the ear of Malchus, serv- 
ant to the high priest, Jesus "touched his ear, 
and healed him" (Luke xxii:5i). 

In none of these cases, so far as man can judge, 
was it necessary for him to touch those he healed. 
He did fully as much in other cases, where he did 



74 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

not use his hands in this way, and in some cases 
he healed those who were at a distance (Matthew 
viii : 13). It seems to have been as the expression 
of his sympathy with the sufferers that he touched 
them, just as we lay our hands on the shoulders 
of our friends when we want to speak to them out 
of our hearts. 

Especially noteworthy are two cases, in which 
he incurred ceremonial defilement by this use of 
his hands. One is that of the son of the widow of 
Nain : "He came nigh and touched the bier" (Luke 
vii : 14), although he thus insured legal defilement 
(Numbers xix: 11), for having to do with a 
dead body. More striking is his healing of the 
leper, as he came down from the mountain of the 
great sermon: "He stretched forth his hand, 
and touched him" (Matthew viii 13), although 
the law of Moses shut the leper out from all con- 
tact with other men (Leviticus xiii:45), and to 
break this law was to incur uncleanness. Never 
shall I forget hearing Dr. Alexander Maclaren 
preach on this miracle : "Why did He touch him, 
even before he healed him? Because he saw 
that the first need of that poor soul, shut off for 
years from his kind, was sympathy — that, even 
before healing. He must have been a loathsome 
sight, and probably more so to our Lord's senses 
than to those of other men. But he put forth his 



TOUCH 75 

hand and touched him, as the expression of his 
pity and sympathy. And was not that what he 
did in the Incarnation itself, drawing near to us in 
our utter defilement, taking hold of us, as he did 
of that poor leper, putting forth that gracious and 
mighty hand to touch us?" 

III. This view is confirmed by his use of his 
hands for other gracious purposes than healing. 
When the mothers brought the little children to 
him, "he took them in his arms, and blessed them, 
laying his hands upon them ,, (Mark x: 16). It 
was a visible expression of that interest in child- 
hood, and love of children, which is notable in the 
gospel story. His every word about them, except 
perhaps his rebuking parable about the children 
who would not play at either wedding or funeral 
(Matthew xi: 17), is one of joyful affection. 

Along with this in spiritual beauty is the scene 
in the upper room, where he ate the passover with 
his disciples. When they came in, there were 
the ewer full of water, the towel, and the basin. It 
was some one's work to wash the feet of the com- 
pany from the dust of the highway, if they were 
to enjoy the feast without distraction; but none 
of them would. One looked up at the ceiling, 
and another out of the window, pretending they 
did not see the ewer and the basin. They made 
for their places at the table, each of them thinking 



76 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

it beneath his dignity to stoop to such a service, 
and finding the best reasons why some other of 
the Twelve should do it. Then the Master arose, 
poured the water into the basin, and girded him- 
self with the towel, and stooped to serve them 
with the loving touch of a cleansing hand. It 
was the truest humility, which means getting 
down to the ground (humus) because God has 
something for one to do there that cannot be done 
anywhere else. 

IV. As love evokes love in return, so our 
Lord's touch encouraged others to touch him. In 
Galilee, "wheresoever he entered, into villages, or 
cities, or into the country, they laid the sick in the 
market-places, and besought him that they might 
touch if it were but the border of his garment : and 
as many as touched him were made whole" (Mark 
vi.*56; Matthew xiv:36). An outstanding in- 
stance of this is the woman who came behind him 
in the throng and touched the hem of his garment, 
and was healed of the disease which had been 
weakening and impoverishing her for twelve 
years. But it was out of himself, and not out of 
the garment, that the power had passed which 
wrought the cure. The hand got nothing, and 
the garment gave nothing, but her faith had 
brought her into contact with the Saviour, and 
thus made her whole. 



TOUCH 77 

Apart from demands upon his power to heal, 
his friends show their affection by touching him. 
The woman which was a sinner breaks through 
the bonds of pharisaic propriety and follows him 
into the house of Simon, the Pharisee, "and stand- 
ing behind at his feet, weeping, she began to wet 
his feet with her tears, and wiped them with 
the hair of her head, and kissed his feet" (Luke 
vii:38). Dr. Melanchthon W. Stryker suggests 
that there is as much of affection as of doubt in the 
demand of the apostle Thomas, "Except I shall 
see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my 
finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand 
into his side, I will not believe" (John xx:25). 
He thinks this was an expression of his sincere 
love for the Master, which asked for the touch that 
is more intimate than sight. May we not say 
that the substance of the speech shows doubt, but 
the form of it affection? "That disciple, whom 
Jesus loved" especially, is the evangelist who re- 
cords for us the saying of Thomas, and it recalls 
his own language in the opening words of his 
great epistle : "That which was from the begin- 
ning, that which we have heard, that which we 
have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, 
and our hands handled, concerning the Word 
of life . . . declare we unto you also, that ye 
also may have fellowship with us: yea, and our 



78 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son 
Jesus Christ." 

V. When our Lord is about to pass from the 
region of sense to that of faith, he assures his peo- 
ple that they are to lose nothing by the change. 
He will still be "in touch with them." The 
Comforter is not to take his place, but to take 
what is his and make it known to them. What 
otherwise might have been mere facts of history 
in their memories, are to become the present, liv- 
ing truths of their Christian experience, and not 
theirs only, but of all who believe on him to the 
end of time. For the Spirit's work is to make 
Jesus Christ more real to us than he was to those 
who saw his works and heard him speak. 
Through his ministry, those years of our Lord's 
ministry, with his sacrificial death and triumphant 
resurrection, become a part of all true Christians' 
lives. 

The gospel calls upon us to "live in touch" with 
the God whom Jesus reveals as his Father and 
ours. We are not called to submission to a dis- 
tant and unlovable deity, like the Allah of the 
Moslem ; nor to a chilly adoration of a philosophic 
absolute, who can be described only in negative 
terms; nor to the worship of an infinite rabbi, 
such as the later Jewish theology presents. We 
are brought to a living communion with a gracious 



TOUCH 79 

Friend and Father, whose love to us is reflected 
in the affection of all who have been dearest and 
kindest to us among men. He is nearer to us 
than these could be, nearer than our very selves. 
As F. W. Faber says, "God never is so far off as 
only to be near." No language that does not break 
the bounds of our finite personality is too strong 
to express our closeness to him "in him we 
live, and move, and have our being." 

It is the Incarnation which makes this intel- 
ligible to us. The Old Testament presents God 
and man in contrast and antithesis, as many 
Christians still speak of them, though not in 
Christian fashion. Such language was necessary 
in the lower classes of God's great school, because 
any other would have led men to error and idol- 
atry. It is not without its uses still, when the 
thought of the nearness of God obscures his 
awfulness to us. But God after speaking "to 
the fathers in the prophets in many parts and in 
many manners, hath in the end of the days 
spoken unto us in his Son" (Hebrews i: i, 2) 
fully and clearly; and that not so much by what 
the Son said, as by what the Son is. In him our 
human nature is exhibited in its true character, 
that which was in the thought of God when he 
said, "Let us make man in our own image." Our 
humanity stands up in Jesus Christ, a thing pure, 



80 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

spotless, and splendid; and it is in him that we 
are to see and estimate it, and to be changed to 
that image by the vision and the fellowship (II 
Corinthians iii:i8). We are to regard as in- 
human all that falls below "the measure of the 
stature of the fullness of Christ." It is not true 
that "to err is human;" nor should we speak of 
"the infirmities of human nature," but with 
Paul, of the infirmity of our flesh ; that is, of the 
perversion of our human nature by sin. 

VI. Working "in touch" is the method of the 
kingdom of God. Jesus shrank from no con- 
tact with the men he sought to save, although he 
must have felt their degradation as we never can 
feel it. There was no "submerged tenth" too 
deeply sunk for him to follow it into the depths, 
that he might lift it up to goodness and forgive- 
ness. Men have tried to do his work while stand- 
ing afar from those they sought to benefit ; but to 
little result. The greatest who have followed in 
his footsteps, have followed him in this as in other 
things. The Moravians who offered to become 
slaves, that they might be allowed to reach the 
negro slaves in the West Indies, and who made 
their abode among the lepers, knowing what that 
must end in, that they might reach that class, 
were illustrations of his method, and of his un- 
resting pity for lost men. 



TOUCH 81 

Our own generation has seen a notable amount 
of return to his method, even among those who 
are not working in his name. Social reformers 
are discovering that they can do little good for 
people of any sort, while they hold them at arm's 
length. "I have learned/' says a worker in one 
of the University settlements, "that you can get 
access to the people who need you only by living 
with them. They will not come to you ; but Jew 
and Gentile will make you welcome if you come to 
them. Our meetings for their benefit are a 
failure. Our personal intercourse with them, 
man to man, has been promising great good. It 
is of no use to come once or twice to see them; 
you must live with them, if you are to do anything 
for them." 

So Thomas Chalmers gave up his wealthy par- 
ish in Glasgow, and took charge of one in the 
"wynds," that he might get near to the poor, and 
find some way of relieving their wants without 
pauperizing them by either public and unloving 
assistance, or heedless giving! So Caroline Hill 
took charge of the wretched court in East Lon- 
don, which rarely had missed mention for a day 
in the police reports, and by living among its 
people was able to change it into a place of 
sobriety, thrift, and honesty. "Not alms but a 
friend," is the motto of the new charity, which 



82 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

Chalmers began, and which Miss Hill revived. 
The man or woman who would help the poor must 
give himself to them. Anything short of that is 
cheap, and likely to be mischievous. The touch 
of a loving hand may be worth more than all the 
gifts with which you may fill it. 

We are learning to cease patronage of the poor, 
and to follow Jesus Christ in his ministry of touch 
and sympathy. The love which does not shrink 
from contact with what often must be re- 
pulsive, is that which follows in his foot- 
steps, and interprets him to men. But 
the love must be there. The loveless gift, as 
Chalmers said, degrades the recipient. Nor is 
anything more repulsive to the poor than to be 
approached with insincere phrases, and shallow 
professions of interest in them and their needs. 
No eyes are keener than those which have been 
sharpened by want, and they have learned to meet 
insincerity with insincerity. None who approach 
them in the spirit of the divine Master need fear 
being misconstrued or repelled. 



VI 
SOWING AND REAPING 



CHAPTER VI 



SOWING AND REAPING 



It was not until the Hebrew people came into 
possession of the land promised to their fathers, 
that they were able to take up the tillage of the 
soil as the means of their support. From Abra- 
ham to Joshua, a period of at least five centuries, 
they were exclusively shepherds, and generally 
without any settled habitation. The conquest of 
Palestine enabled them to become farmers, and 
lay aside their nomadic habits. The change was 
much greater than appears on the surface of 
things. The life of the shepherd was v one of hard- 
ship and exposure, through want of homes and 
their equipment. It was one of constant peril, as 
it admitted of no permanent defense against 
marauders. It was a life of great monotony, 
without interruption of routine except at lambing 
and shearing time. It was commonly a life of 
painful solitude, and thus exposed to the melan- 
choly which isolation from other men breeds. 

The life of the ancient farmer was not that of 
a man living in a farmhouse apart, but that of a 
resident in a walled city, who went out to till his 

85 



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SOWING AND REAPING 87 

tares, or no crop whatever. The races which 
found it hard to reach any certainty, unless 
driven on by necessity, clung to more palpable 
ways of getting their food by hunting and fish- 
ing, while others got as far as keeping sheep or 
cattle. In the Bible story, Esau is the type of the 
distrustful races; while Jacob, with his crop of 
red lentils, stands for those which had courage to 
risk their seed in sowing, in the faith that the har- 
vest would be of the same kind, and abundant 
enough to repay the risk. 

It is in the Zend-Avesta, the sacred book of the 
ancient Persians, that the antagonism of the two 
kinds of peoples comes out most clearly. The 
Persian was a tiller of the soil, and regarded it as 
a sacred thing, not to be profaned by the burial of 
corpses in it, while it repaid this reverence by the 
gifts of .the harvest. Their savage neighbors, 
the Turanians, to the north of Persia, despised 
agriculture, and the Zend-Avesta makes the con- 
trast between the two modes of life almost identi- 
cal with the distinction between good and bad 
men. The Turanian justified this by his readi- 
ness to plunder the harvest-fields of his indus- 
trious neighbors. A similar situation existed in 
America before the Spanish conquests. The peo- 
ple of the warmer parts of the continent had been 
driven by necessity to the cultivation of maize and 



88 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

manioc. Their harvests were plundered by the 
more savage tribes to the north, who also killed or 
enslaved the cultivators. The Navajos named the 
months of their calendar from the animal they 
most hunted in each, and one was "Mexican 
month." 

In the long run, the tillers of the soil have come 
to the front as the masters of the world, because 
of their wealth, their social coherence, and their 
trained intelligence. The taproot of their suc- 
cess was their faith in the beneficent order which 
controls the world. They have learned also that 
the same great law of the harvest pervades the 
whole of human life. The Greek poet Hesiod, 
the Latin orator Cicero, and the Hebrew apostle 
Paul express this in almost identical terms. They 
apply to the moral life of men the saying, "A man 
reaps as he sows/' meaning that we here touch a 
natural law, which has its exact parallel in the 
life of man as a responsible being. 

The Scriptures recognize a double cor- 
respondence here. The Old Testament, for the 
most part, finds this in the reaping of what we 
sow in the conduct of our lives. The New Testa- 
ment applies the analogy more commonly to the 
labors of our Master and his servants for the wel- 
fare of mankind. Let us look at some of the as- 
pects of this great parable. 



SOWING AND REAPING 89 

I. God and man work together in the tillage 
of the soil, and the ingathering of the harvest. 
Man avails himself of God's law of increase, by 
which the scanty seed grows into the abundant 
harvest, supplying seed to the sower and bread to 
the eater. He casts himself upon the established 
order of God in the creation, when he risks his 
seed in the earth. However well he may plant 
it and tend it, he cannot of himself make one grain 
germinate, or bring forth one blade out of the 
earth, as Luther says. Along with his faith 
goes hope. He looks to see sunshine and rainfall 
given in due measure, also as part of God's order. 

We lose a right sense of this through the blunt- 
ness of our perceptions. We have allowed our- 
selves to grow used to the wonder of God's work- 
ing in these common things, until all wonder has 
ceased out of the world for us. We think of na- 
ture as a big piece of machinery, which works 
apart from the presence and will of its Creator. 
So we find it hard to pray, as his Son bids us, 
"Give us this day our daily bread." We have 
allowed the constancy of its coming to hide God's 
hand in the giving. His Son, however, never 
took a piece of bread into his hands without bless- 
ing the Father who gave it. There must have 
been something distinctive in his way of doing 
this. The two disciples did not recognize him 



go NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

during their walk of five miles with him to 
Emmaus, but knew him at once when he "took the 
bread and blessed; and breaking it he gave to 
them." Must he not have taken it as though it 
came right out of his Fathers hand, as we also 
should do? 

Even the heathen acknowledge this truth in 
their way. Every pantheon had a deity of the 
harvest, who was worshiped while the crops were 
growing, and especially when they were gathered. 
The only native American idol which has sur- 
vived the zeal of the Christian missionaries repre- 
sents the Mexican goddess of the maize plant, and 
in her honor more festivals were held than for any 
other. The apostle therefore appealed to a uni- 
versal belief, when he told the heathen people of 
Lystra that the "living God, who made the heaven 
and the earth and the sea, and all that in them is 
. . . left not himself without witness, in that 
he did good and gave you from heaven rains and 
fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and 
gladness." It is upon this truth that our coun- 
try bases her observance of Thanksgiving day, 
when the whole nation acknowledges God as the 
giver of our harvests. 

When we pass from the natural to the spiritual 
order, we find this fact of man's dependence upon 
God not less evident. We find it so, as the Old 



SOWING AND REAPING 91 

Testament teaches, in the conduct of our lives. 
We are in the presence of moral laws as distinct 
as that by which the seed germinates "after its 
kind/' and bears its own fruit. 

We all, indeed, are sowing seed of some sort, 
and thus submitting our lives to the operation of 
the law of growth ; and we all will have a harvest 
of some sort. It may be a bad one. We may 
"plow iniquity, and sow trouble," and "reap the 
same" (Job iv : 8) ; or "sow iniquity and reap 
calamity" (Proverbs xxii : 8) ; or "sow the wind" 
and "reap the whirlwind" (Hosea viii : 7). But 
this is more often and properly the neglect of till- 
age, which leaves the weeds of evil to spring up 
and possess the soil. It is not the conduct of life, 
but throwing the reins on the neck of our animal 
passions and our baser instincts, and bidding 
them take us where they will. 

All real conduct of life is a laying hold of 
divine help, and working with God. It starts 
from him, and not from ourselves. We are in- 
deed to work out our own salvation with fear 
and trembling, because he has worked it in, be- 
cause he worketh in us to will and to work, for 
his good pleasure. There can be no good in us, 
either in germ or in fruition, which is not from 
him. It is he who implants in our hearts that 
incorruptible seed, which liveth and abideth, 



92 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

and which makes us fruitful in the virtues and 
the activities of a Christian life. Here it is that 
Christianity parts company from the paganism 
even of Hesiod and Cicero. The latter, in his 
dialogue "On the Nature of the Gods," makes one 
of the speakers remark that men thank the gods 
for all sorts of external benefits — for prosperity, 
for safety from perils, for fair children, and beau- 
tiful houses; but that no one ever thanks the 
gods that he is virtuous, honest, chaste, generous. 
And quite rightly, he thinks, since a man owes 
these to himself. Christians know that it is just 
for these that they are most bound to give God 
thanks. 

We find this equally true, as the New Testa- 
ment teaches it, in the spiritual harvest which is 
gathered from efforts to do good to men. The 
greatest and most fruitful workers have been 
those who felt most clearly their dependence upon 
God. "I planted," says Paul, "Apollos watered; 
but God gave the increase. So then neither is 
he that planteth anything, neither he that water- 
eth; but God that giveth the increase." Man's 
part, he says is foolishness — "the foolishness of 
preaching" by which God "is pleased to save them 
that believe." 

It is indeed foolishness to expect sinners to give 
heed to a message which runs counter to all their 



SOWING AND REAPING 93 

natural inclinations, humbles their pride, and calls 
upon them to do what is beyond their power. It 
is a mere waste of words unless God be in it, and 
make men welcome what is most distasteful, and 
enable them to believe what is incredible, and to do 
what is impossible to flesh and blood. It is just 
this that makes the preaching of the gospel a 
thing apart from all other speech of man to men. 
It is a message from God, with the assurance 
that a divine power attends it, making it possible 
for sinners to believe and obey it. 

The human instrument, indeed, God will not 
dispense with. "How shall they believe," says 
the apostle, "in him whom they have not heard? 
and how shall they hear without a preacher? and 
how shall they preach, except they be sent ?" God 
has committed this ministry to men, and not to 
the angels, for the good of men. He draws us 
"with cords of a man, with bands of love" 
(Hosea xi:4), in speaking to us through the 
heart and the voice of a fellow-man, just as in the 
Incarnation he meets us as one of ourselves — 



"So through the thunder comes a human voice 
Saying, 'O heart I made, a heart beats here ! 
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself ! 
Thou hast no power nor mayest conceive of mine, 
But love I gave thee, with myself to love, 
And thou must love me who have died for thee/ " 



94 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

Nor is the true preacher a mere lifeless trum- 
pet, through which a message is sounded in our 
ears. His fitness for the work is through the 
training he has had from the Spirit of God. The 
life of the Spirit in his heart gives him an entire 
assurance of the truth he brings, a lively sense of 
the need of those he addresses, and a yearning love 
to reach and touch them. Thus it is made manifest 
that "the foolishness of God is wiser than men." 

II. The farmer proceeds upon the conviction 
that the law of growth will operate uniformly in 
every case where the conditions are fairly favor- 
able. We as a people risk hundreds of millions 
of dollars every year upon that conviction, and 
the labors of millions of men besides. All this is 
risked upon something unseen, intangible, and 
yet real. The gains of the hunter and the herds- 
man are much more tangible from the outset, but 
those of the farmer are greater. When Eu- 
ropean settlement began, the entire population of 
our country was about a quarter of a million of 
Indians. They had all the resources of our na- 
tional area at their disposal, but they lived mainly 
by hunting and fishing. They suffered from 
hunger very often, and died of famine in many 
years. We are feeding nearly ninety millions at 
home, and we send the food for millions across 
the Atlantic. 



SOWING AND REAPING 95 

The spiritual law of seedtime and harvest is 
just as certain, but we are far slower to learn its 
truth. We even fancy sometimes that we can 
evade it by our cleverness, although we would not 
venture upon that with the natural law. By no 
sort of tillage would we seek a crop of wheat 
where we had sown only spelt or rye. 

The religions of the world are in some cases 
little else than devices to escape the law of reap- 
ing as you have sown, by bribing the divine pow- 
ers to show favoritism. There are erroneous 
forms of Christian teaching or believing, which 
have the same purpose. The notions that some 
ritual observance, or wearing of a scapular, or 
an emotional experience which left the life un- 
changed, or a rigid orthodoxy of the head which 
has nothing to do with the heart, will serve as a 
substitute for holy living, are subtle forms of An- 
tinomianism, which reappear in every age. The 
apostle's doctrine as justification by faith without 
the works of the law, in the Epistle to the Gala- 
tians, has been as much abused in this way, and 
wrested by the ignorant and the unsteadfast to 
their own destruction (II Peter iii : 16), as any 
other part of the Bible. It is, however, in this 
very epistle that he gives us the solemn warning : 
"Be not deceived ; God is not mocked : for what- 
soever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. 



96 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

For he that soweth unto his own flesh shall of the 
flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth unto 
the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap eternal life/' 
God "will render to even- man according to his 
works*" I Romans ii : 6). "Follow after peace with 
all men," says the Epistle to the Hebrews, "and 
the sanctification without which no man shall see 
the Lord." John saw the dead before the 
Throne, "and they were judged every man ac- 
cording to their works.'" 

This spiritual law commends itself to our judg- 
ments and our consciences in the most forcible 
way. It fits into all that we know of the universe, 
as exactly as does the natural law of gravitation, 
and we have jus: as rood reason for acting upon 
its truth. There is nothing that is either fac- 
titious or arbitrary about it. The fruits of our 
lives are the corresponding outcome of what we 
have been planting and sowing in the conduct of 
our lives: and in the nature of things they can- 
not be otherwise. Yet no sinner ever gathers his 
armful or barnful of thistles and darnell and wild 
mustard without grumbling at its not being 
wheat. 

Even good men fall short here, though in a less 

degree. Robert Bruce, the great Scottish 

preacher, was an eminently good man. When 

sed to declare his full belief that the Earl of 






SOWING AND REAPING 97 

Gowrie had made a treasonable attempt on the 
life of King James, he said they were asking of 
him a "persuasion of the fact which he could not 
get for the articles of his belief." "What !" said 
Lord Kinloss, "are you not fully persuaded of 
the articles of your belief?" "Not, my lord, as 
I should be. If you and I were both persuaded 
that there were a hell, we would do otherwise than 
as we do." If we felt, at every instant of life, the 
reality of the spiritual laws which govern life, we 
would rise to heroic heights of obedience and en- 
durance. Then we would be earning the praise 
our Lord gives to the pearl-trader, who realized 
that the one pearl was worth more than all he 
possessed, and who acted with businesslike 
promptness on that knowledge. And we would 
not be falling under that sorrowful rebuke, that 
the children of this world are wiser after their 
sort than the children of the Light. Those go 
to their object as straight as the bird flies, while 
these hesitate, shilly-shally, and compromise. 

III. This stern law of reaping as we sow has 
a gracious and gospel aspect, in respect to the 
abundance of the harvest, whether natural or 
spiritual. Our Lord especially insists upon this. 
He says that the seed which fell upon good ground 
bore fruit "thirtyfold, and sixtyfold, and a hun- 
dredfold." May we not suppose that he had been 



g8 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

counting the gains in a wheat ear, and saw in this 
the beneficence of the law of growth, and a 
prophecy of nature as to the growth of his king- 
dom? This natural multiplication goes far be- 
yond what we should have expected. It is in- 
crease after a divine measure, rather than the 
human. Our Lord sees another example of this 
in the mustard plant, which grows from one of 
the tiniest of seeds, but within the year mounts up 
into quite a branchy bush, the biggest of the gar- 
den herbs of Palestine, and affords rest and shel- 
ter for the birds. The Talmud quotes a Rab 
Simeon, who said he had one in his garden so 
large that he climbed into it. A third of his illus- 
trations is the diffusion of the morsel of leaven 
through the six gallons of meal, which we now 
know to be another instance of vegetable expan- 
sion. 

To the truth which these illustrate, he con- 
stantly returns in his teaching. He tells us of the 
surprise which awaits us, when we see the great 
results which will come from seemingly small 
causes. A cup of cold water, if given in the name 
of Christ, or even in that of a disciple, shall not 
lose its reward. The giver may forget it, but not 
he. Whoever makes sacrifices for Christ's sake 
and the gospel's "shall receive a hundredfold, 
and shall inherit eternal life." He who is 



SOWING AND REAPING 99 

found faithful in the handling of five talents or 
ten, shall be called to bear rule over as many 
cities. In the day of judgment those who minis- 
tered to the needs of his hungry, naked, sick, or 
imprisoned brethren, will have the same measure 
of joy as if they had done this to himself. Thus 
he lifts the law of growth into a very gospel of 
growth. 

His teaching is confirmed by the experiences of 
even the life that now is. In the conduct of life 
we are all tempted to despise the small crosses he 
sends us, the small openings for kindness and 
self-sacrifice the day brings us, and the petty duties 
and burdens which fill up our humdrum exist- 
ence. When we meet these faithfully and nobly, 
we have our reward on a grander scale than we 
could have expected. Burdens grow to wings, 
crosses to crowns, faithful endurance to triumph ; 
and from each discharge of duty we acquire the 
power to meet the next with efficiency. "We see 
dimly in the present what is small and what is 
great," as Lowell says. We are blinded by the 
illusions of life, and take the great for the small, 
because it is not the big. Our small victories in 
the face of temptation are won over obstacles and 
spiritual enemies of the highest rank, and are 
won to the shaping of our characters, the 
strengthening of our wills, the purification of our 

tore. 



ioo NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

vision, and the increase of our faith and joy. 
Prof. William James suggests that to do each day 
of life some one thing we know we ought to do, 
but do not want to do, would have the result of 
making us wiser and braver men, and more fit for 
great things if these fell to our share. 

On the New Testament side of the parable, it 
is the joy of those who work for others to have a 
present experience of this law of increase. We 
who teach have it in a lower sphere. Our "boys" 
come back to us in their manhood and say, "I 
never forgot what you said to us one day," and 
go on to quote something which has escaped our 
memories completely. Every day of earnest and 
honest work in the schoolroom or the college class 
reaches some with a touch which helps to shape 
lives in the years of their plasticity. There is, 
however, one teacher who far surpasses us in 
this. It is she who has the first word with her 
child, before any other can reach him, and who is 
molding him in ways which neither she nor the 
child can see. It will take heaven to show what 
the work of Christian mothers has been in build- 
ing up the kingdom, and it will be a joyful sur- 
prise to many a mother, perhaps to all of them. 

The minister of the word already shares in the 
joy of his Lord, which is depicted in the fifteenth 
chapter of Luke's Gospel, in the parables of the 



SOWING AND REAPING 101 

lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son. As is there 
said, it is the joy which lights up heaven with a 
new gladness, because a sinner has turned to God. 
The effort the preacher puts forth is trifling in 
comparison with the vastness of the result which 
is achieved. As our Lord told his apostles, he is 
but reaping where others have sown in most 
cases. The best environment of the man's life 
has been working toward grace. As George Her- 
bert says : — 

Lord, with what care hast thou begirt us round! 

Parents first season us : then schoolmasters 
Deliver us to laws; they send us bound 

To rules of reason, holy messengers, 

Pulpits and Sundays, sorrow dogging sin, 
Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes, 

Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in, 
Bibles laid open, millions of surprises, 

Blessings beforehand, ties of gratefulness, 
The sound of glory ringing in our ears; 

Without, our shame; within, our consciences; 
Angels and grace, eternal hopes and fears. 

All these have entered into the plan of the 
man's life, who at last is brought by the preached 
word to submit his will to God. And with all 
these has been the divine Sower, whose work 
underlies every good influence which touches any 
human life, whether effectually or not. Yet the 



102 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

reaper, who gathers the harvest, is not the less 
blessed. "He that reapeth receiveth wages/' the 
Lord tells his apostles, "and gathereth fruit unto 
life eternal; that he that soweth and he that 
reapeth may rejoice together." In his very first 
epistle the greatest of apostolic reapers tells how 
he thus rejoiced with his Lord. Paul writes to 
his Thessalonian converts : "For what is our hope, 
or joy, or crown of glorying? Are not even ye, 
before our Lord Jesus at his coming ? For ye are 
our glory and our joy." 

IV. Harvest is naturally and everywhere a 
time of rejoicing. The risks of tillage being be- 
yond man's wisdom or strength to cope with, 
when these perils are past, men's hearts grow 
lighter. The Hebrew Feast of Tabernacles was 
their harvest festival, and the spirit which ani- 
mated it finds fit expression in the Eighty-first 
Psalm. When Isaiah would describe the deep 
and hearty joy of the reign of the Prince of 
Peace, he says : — 

They joy before thee according to the joy of the harvest, 
And as men rejoice when they divide the spoil, 

binding together two of the situations in which 
social joy overflows into festivity. 

Who that was brought up on an old-fashioned 
farm, will ever forget the harvest-home? The 



SOWING AND REAPING 103 

last handful of wheat was cut with care, bound 
with bright ribbons, and carried home by the 
reaper to grace the fireplace in the farm-kitchen. 
Then came the feast, at which master and men, 
with their households, ate at one huge table. 
After hunger and thirst were satisfied, there were 
cheerful talk of the season just passed, merry 
jesting about its incidents, singing of old ballads, 
and games for the younger folk. Honest joy and 
mirth drew all together, and if any were kept away 
by sickness, their share was sent them. When- 
ever I read that verse in the ninth chapter of 
Isaiah, it takes me back to the Ulster farm of my 
boyhood, and calls up the kind faces and warm 
hearts which gathered at its harvest-home.* 

The spiritual life, like the life of the farm, is 
one which reaches its joys through its toils and 
even its anxieties. It is a steady transition from 
the sadder to the brighter side of things. "The 
evening and the morning were the first day ;" and 
the shadows of the one passing into the bright- 
ness of the other have been present in every spir- 
itual day since the first. As Lord Bacon says, 

* Harvest-home is still kept in many parts of America, 
notably in New Jersey, where the farmers of a neighbor- 
hood unite in a common celebration. The grounds of the 
Presbyterian Church of Dayton, N. J., have been thus used 
for years past. 



104 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

adversity is among the very promises of the New 
Testament. It tells us of tribulations in the world 
to be endured; of chastenings which seal us as 
the sons of God; of reproaches for the name of 
Christ ; of sharing in his sufferings ; of daily bear- 
ing of our cross. Our Lord allowed his disciples 
to cherish no delusions on this point, declaring 
that he sent them forth "as sheep in the midst of 
wolves," and warning them to expect at men's 
hands no better treatment than he himself re- 
ceived. 

It is part of that intimate communion which 
Christians have with their Lord, that they should 
suffer in the presence of sin and shame as he did. 
We must taste of the bitter of his cup, as well as 
of the sweet, and learn why he was "a man of 
sorrows, and acquainted with grief." The sight 
of the world's evil was a burden to him at all 
times; the vision of its shamefulness pierced his 
heart. They who are his desire to share his 
estimate of human life, and to "know the fellow- 
ship of his sufferings." Paul went farther than 
we can see our way, when he spoke of "filling up 
that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ." 
The saying indicates the closeness of his sym- 
pathy with his Master. 

This is one side of the Christian's experience, 
but the Scriptures always conjoin with it the joy 



SOWING AND REAPING 105 

of the harvest. "Blessed are ye that weep now : 
for ye shall laugh/' "Blessed are they that 
mourn : for they shall be comforted." "Ye shall 
be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned 
into joy." These two notes, in this order, always 
run through the New Testament, as describing 
the blessedness of the saints. It is in exact har- 
mony with them that the Christian's last expe- 
rience in this world should be emergence through 
the shadow of death into the light of the life 
eternal. 

The same alteration from sorrow to joy runs 
through the life given to the service of men. Our 
Lord went before his disciples in this experience 
also. He knew what it was to toil in vain for the 
spiritual elevation of those who heard him. He 
mourned over the blindness of the cities by the 
Galilsean lake, which saw his mighty works, but 
did not repent. He went over Jerusalem, saying, 
"If thou hadst known in this day, even thou, the 
things which belong unto peace! but now they 
are hid from thine eyes." To his countrymen at 
large he said: "Ye will not come to me that ye 
may have life." "Few there be that find" the 
way to life. 

The success of our Lord's ministry, if meas- 
ured by the number of the disciples he made, was 
far from remarkable. At the end of three years 



106 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

he had but a handful, and not one of them stood 
by him in the dark hour. So has it been with 
many of his most spiritual servants. Henry 
Martyn toiled to small result among the Persians ; 
Keith-Falconer sowed the good seed on stony 
ground among the Arabs ; James Gilmour labored 
for a lifetime among the Mongols without a con- 
vert to show. Even those who have had marked 
success have had to endure the heartache of pro- 
longed failure before it came, as Robert Moffatt 
did among the Bechuanas, feeling "as if he were 
trying to lift a mirror by taking hold of its face." 
Where the sowing has been without the har- 
vest during the life of the laborer, it yet may have 
a brighter and better result for the world in the 
long run. Dr. W. Robertson Niccoll suggests that 
there is a prophecy of the final success of mis- 
sions, which have seemed to fail, in the words of 
the Twenty-second Psalm : — 

All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn unto 

Jehovah ; 
And all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before 

thee. 

The seed fell into the ground and seemed to die — 
in a sense did die — but it brought forth much 
fruit. 

So, as our Lord predicted, it proved true of his 



SOWING AND REAPING 107 

own work. He gave the world the best that could 
be given it, and it gave him the cross. Men 
wrote "Failure !" on that sealed tomb, and turned 
lightly to their affairs of ritual piety, or money- 
making, or politics. But he who had said, "Give, 
and it shall be given unto you; good measure, 
pressed down, shaken together, running over, 
shall they give into your bosom," was not to 
receive less than he promised to those who heard 
him. The grandest powers of mankind have been 
used in his service — the eloquence of the orator, 
the speech-mastery of the poet, the meditation of 
the philosopher, the artistic skill of painter and 
sculptor and architect, the statesmanship of the 
ruler. All these are but the summit-peaks of a 
land ruled by his memory. Millions and hun- 
dreds of millions have lived for him, repressing 
the evil passions and brute instincts of their na- 
ture, laying aside their violent tempers, purging 
themselves of their impurity, rising above their 
covetousness, and toiling in honest ways for them- 
selves and others. They have cut off the right 
hand and plucked out the right eye at his bidding, 
and carried their daily cross that they might fol- 
low him. Myriads have died for him, and in no 
century so many as in that whose close we have 
witnessed. More love him to-day than yester- 
day, and more will love him to-morrow than 



108 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

to-day. His influence, unlike that of other great 
men, at once deepens and widens with every year 
since his death, showing it not to be subject to 
that law of limitation which binds all finite things. 
Of him especially may we say : — 

"They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. 
He that goeth forth weeping, bearing seed for sowing, 
Shall doubtless come again with joy, bringing his sheaves." 






VII 

UPWARD 



CHAPTER VII 



UPWARD 



Man's erect attitude is the mark of his dignity 
as the highest form of life on our planet. The 
lower vertebrates have their spines either parallel 
with the surface of the earth, or forming an acute 
angle with it. Man alone stands at right angles 
with its plane, as though to intimate that he alone 
must rise above it to live his true life. His is the 
attitude of aspiration. 

In the human body the higher organs lie in the 
upper part of its structure. Normally we are 
more alive, sensitively, intellectually, and morally, 
in that quarter. It is only in an abnormal con- 
dition that our vital activity finds any lower 
center than the head and the heart. It is a de- 
cline toward the mere animal. 

The law of gravitation makes it hard to rise 
and easy to sink. It is proverbially easy to "fall 
off a log." That in us which seeks to be master 
of circumstances, to overcome difficulties, and to 
assert our dignity as men, relishes a climb, just 
because it demands effort and persistence. The 
Alpine clubs, which attack every unsealed height. 

in 



112 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

and are turning to the Caucasus and the Hima- 
layas after exhausting Switzerland, represent a 
profound instinct in our human nature. Their 
achievement in itself has small value, but the 
achieving brings exhilaration. On the other 
hand, a fall which passes the bounds of our con- 
trol is a most unwelcome experience. Whoever 
has taken a great and involuntary plunge will 
never forget the horror of it, and probably 
will recall it as a nightmare in his sleep for 
years. 

For these reasons, and perhaps others besides, 
the human race has come to treat motion upward 
and downward as symbols of moral advance or 
retrogression. Uprightness itself, apart from 
movement, it accepts as symbolic of manly in- 
tegrity, while it describes the vile things of life as 
low, base, despicable; that is, fit to be looked 
down upon. And as forms of faith in the un- 
seen seek there what is morally superior, man 
looks up for his gods, and not downward, the 
only exceptions being those which reign in the 
regions of the dead, as Pluto among the Greeks, 
the dei inferni of the Romans, and the heli of the 
Norse mythology. 

These analogies have entered so deeply into 
our thought and speech that even when we come 
to recognize that upward and downward are 






UPWARD 113 

purely relative terms, and that what is upward to 
us is downward to our kindred in Australia, we 
continue to think and speak in the old groove, and 
to talk of heaven as above us, and of hell as be- 
neath us, as did the Roman poet : — 

"Facilis descensus Averni, 
Sed revocare gradum, superasque evadere ad auras, 
Hoc opus, hie labor est." 

This form of thought had much to do with the 
shaping of the religions of the world. At every 
point in their history we find men looking upward 
for an object of worship, but looking higher and 
yet higher as they toil after the unseen. These 
religions, indeed, may be defined as man's efforts 
to climb upward to God, while the gospel is the 
stooping of God to man. 

I. A very early form of paganism looks up to 
and worships the tree. This is connected with 
the fact that the tree was the first home of man, 
throughout a large part of the world. Mr. 
Landor found tree-dwellers in the Philippines. 
The ordinary type of house in Btumah, and most 
of the islands southeast of Asi?., is evidently a 
modification of that which was built in the 
branches of a tree, on a platform above the reach 
of wild beasts and wilder men. In the west we 
find that houses planted on the solid earth were, 



H4 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 



in many instances, built around a tree. It was 
thus with the home of Ulysses in Ithaca. In the 
Volsunga Saga, the royal hall of the Volsung 
king is built around a great tree, into whose trunk 
Odin drives the sword, which is to be the property 
of the hero who can draw it out. This shows that 
even in the north the tree may have been the first 
home. 

The tree thus inhabited was a sacred thing, 
and an object of worship as the protector of the 
home and its occupants. In some cases it fed and 
clothed them. It retained its sacred character, 
and was looked up to as something divine, even 
after the house had come to earth for its founda- 
tion. Two forms of this tree cult are found in 
the idolatry which the Hebrew people sometimes 
adopted from their neighbors. The "ashera" or 
"grove" was a row of wooden pillars (trees with 
the roots cut off, but their branches probably re- 
tained) which were planted beside the altars of 
the moon-goddess Astarte, "the Queen of heaven." 
Besides this, as the prophets tell us, they wor- 
shiped false gods "under every green tree." The 
sacred oak grove of Dordona is the monument of 
a similar worship in early Greece. Caesar says 
that in his days the Germans had no temples, but 
worshiped their gods in sacred groves, and offered 
human sacrifices by hanging men on the trees of 



UPWARD 115 

the grove. Sacred trees played a great part in 
the Druidic worship of the British Islands, and 
survivals of this are found in sacred oaks and 
thorns, now under the protection of the fairies, 
who are said to send disaster upon any one who 
cuts down one of these trees. 

II. The tree might perish by the lightning 
stroke, or by natural decay, and the heart craves 
an imperishable deity. The next objects of man's 
reverence were the "everlasting hills/' as the 
loftiest and most unchanging features of the 
earth's surface. On their summits there reigned 
a peace and a silence which awed those who 
climbed them. There the air blew free and pure. 
They lifted up their protecting bulks between the 
valleys and the storms. They were the most 
ancient landmarks, which sundered tribe from 
tribe, and kept the peace between them. To the 
wanderer, they pointed out the location of his 
home, and they reminded him of the days of his 
childhood, when they had seemed an appendage 
to his father's house. Fusi-yama is thus invested 
with an especial sanctity in the eyes of the Jap- 
anese. It is reproduced in every garden, and 
introduced into every landscape. One of my 
Japanese students told me he could not restrain his 
tears when it came into sight, as he was return- 
ing for the first time from America. 



n6 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

Xor was this sacredness of the mountains ob- 
literated when the conception of the gods as per- 
sonal beings, existing in human form, displaced 
the early worship of natural facts and forces. In 
the summits of the mountains the gods made their 
home. Olympus, in Thessaly, close by the scene 
of the first union of the Hellenic tribes for a com- 
mon defense, came to be regarded as the home 
of Zeus and the other deities of Greek worship. 
In the mountain gorge at Delphi was the shrine 
where Apollo gave out the oracles, which directed 
the whole movement of the Greek people, until 
the self-seeking of its priests undermined confi- 
dence in its utterances. 

III. Higher still were the visible heavens, and 
the heavenly host — sun. moon, and stars. The 
worship of the sky itself had begun before the 
Aryan race broke up into its Asiatic and Euro- 
pean branches. Dyaus-piter, Zeus-pater, Jupiter, 
in Sanscrit, Greek, and Latin, mean "Father- 
heaven;" and while the first holds a very subor- 
dinate place in the Indian Yedas, the second and 
third stand at the head of the deities of the west. 
The worship of heaven is one of the most solemn 
functions of the Emperor of China, whose highest 
title is "Son of Heaven.'' The calm and the 
purity of the firmament, its wondrous shapes of 
beauty and tints of color, its peace under most 



UPWARD 117 

conditions, and its scope as embracing all things, 
suggested divine honors for it. 

The Semitic race, however, was drawn more 
to the worship of the heavenly bodies. Their ex- 
istence in the silence of the great celestial spaces, 
the grand order of their movements, their benefi- 
cence as givers of light and heat, their control of 
the succession of the seasons, their freedom from 
decay, and the belief that their conjunction fore- 
tokened, if it did not procure, the fates of those 
who were born at that instant, all seemed to 
identify them with the Intelligence which con- 
trols the affairs of men. Tradition fixes upon the 
open plains of the Euphrates and Tigris Valley 
as the earliest home of astronomy and astrology ; 
and the worship of the host of heaven would be a 
natural resort for those who had no mountain to 
look up to, especially if they had been removed by 
a sudden and forced emigration from their homes 
in the upland country, and from their ancient 
sanctuaries of tree and hill. 

The Semitic mind, however, demands a per- 
sonal god as the object of its worship, and through 
this demand we find Baal (or Moloch) the sun 
god, Astarte (or Ishtar) the moon god, and 
Chiun (Amos v.26) the Saturn god, standing 
out as distinctly marked personalities, without 
any loss of their position in the sky. These gods, 



n8 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

made in the image of man, shared in his baser as 
well as his better instincts, and the latter were sub- 
ordinated to the former. Their worship became 
an orgy such as Elijah witnessed on Mount Car- 
mel, or an indulgence of sensual passions, or a 
sacrifice of human beings to propitiate their favor. 
Sabaism, or the worship of the host (Tsabaoth) 
of heaven, is the Semitic form of paganism, 
traceable from Uz in the south to Syria 
in the north, and from Assyria in the east to 
Carthage and Cadiz in the west. It was there- 
fore the form of idolatry to which the Hebrews 
were especially tempted, both because of their 
mental affinity with those peoples, and through 
their proximity to the religious centers where 
this worship was practiced. 

Their first contact with Sabaism occurred 
toward the close of their wanderings in the wilder- 
ness, when the Moabites and Midianites, appar- 
ently at the suggestion Balaam, enticed them 
to join in the worship of Baal-peor, through the 
unchaste orgies which characterized Semitic 
Sabaism. From this time to the captivity of 
Jerusalem by Nebuchadrezzar, a period of a 
thousand years (with the exception of the two 
centuries between Samuel and Ahab), we find this 
vile and cruel form of idolatry appearing and re- 
appearing among the Hebrews. It won a great 



UPWARD 119 

victory through the marriage of Ahab with Jeze- 
bel, but reached its height during the apostasy of 
King Manasseh, when altars to Baal and Ashta- 
roth stood in the very courts of the temple, and 
the Valley Hinnom was profaned by human 
sacrifices. Jeremiah, its greatest enemy after 
Elijah, scourges it in his prophecies, declaring 
there were as many altars for it as there were 
streets in Jerusalem, and that the people had for- 
gotten the name of God even in their oaths, and 
substituted that of Baal. Stephen reminds the 
Jews of this as the sink of idolatrous iniquity into 
which their fathers had sunk, quoting the prophet 
Amos. Yet Mosaic worship survived it, and it 
disappeared after the Exile. As Andrew Lang 
says, the unique thing in Hebrew history is 
that the people encountered every temptation 
which had degraded primitive faith into super- 
stition in other peoples, and overcame these 
through the influence exerted by their inspired 
prophets. 

The Scriptures discredit all attempts to find 
God through this looking upward to natural ob- 
jects, whether tree or hill or sky. But just as 
they use freely the language which treats upward 
and downward as symbols of the noble and the 
vile, so they employ the cognate symbolism of 
nature in speaking of divine relations. 



120 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 



I. It is remarkable how prominent the tree is 
in the earliest chapters of the Mosaic record. 
Whether the tree of knowledge of good and evil, 
and the tree of life in the midst of Eden, are sym- 
bols or facts, they fit into the primitive mode of 
thought, but to correct its errors. The tree is not 
put forward as a sacred thing in itself, but as the 
instrument by which a divine Being higher than 
itself deals with men. 

Throughout the early history of the elect peo- 
ple we hear nothing, indeed, of tree-worship, but 
of the constant selection of the tree as the back- 
ground of home, and also of sacred acts. Abra- 
ham made his home under the oaks of Mamre, 
the Amorite, his friend as well as neighbor. 
Jacob hid the teraphim "under the oak which is in 
Shechem." The angel which called Gideon to 
judge Israel "came and sat under the oak which 
was in Ophrah," and after their interview "Gid- 
eon built an altar there unto Jehovah, and called it 
Jehovah-shalom." After his death, and the mur- 
der of all his legitimate sons but Jotham, "the 
men of Shechem . . . made Abimelech king, by 
the oak of the pillar that was in Shechem" — the 
same tree as was standing "by the sanctuary of 
Jehovah" in Shechem, when Joshua set up under it 
a great stone as a witness against all who de- 
parted from the words of God's law. 



UPWARD 121 

II. The prominence of the mountains and hills 
in the Bible cannot escape any attentive reader. 
The story, from Sinai to Olivet, from the giving 
of the law to the Ascension, may be said to run 
over the mountains of Palestine, with the excep- 
tion of the seventy weary years of the Captivity 
on the mud-flats of the Tigris Valley. The last 
book of the Canon is placed on the island of Pat- 
mos, one of a group of mountains half sunk in the 
yEgean Sea ; and for its last vision the apostle is 
carried "in the Spirit to a mountain great and 
high," that he may behold the holy city. 

It seems to have been the divine purpose to take 
the mountains as the fitting background for the 
great scenes of sacred history. On Sinai (or 
Horeb), which rises about seven thousand three 
hundred and seventy-five feet above the Red Sea, 
the law was given ; Elijah received the impressive 
lesson that divine power differs in kind from 
physical force; and Paul studied out the prob- 
lems of law and gospel (Galatians i: 17; iv: 25). 
From Mounts Gerizim and Ebal, after the con- 
quest, the blessings and the curses of the law were 
proclaimed to the Hebrew people. The taber- 
nacle was set up by Joshua at Shiloh, on a hill 
which rises two thousand three hundred and 
thirty feet above the surrounding plain. 
After the capture of the ark by the Philistines, 



122 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

the tabernacle seems to have been removed to 
Nob, a city of the priests, which overlooked 
Jerusalem (Isaiah x:32) from the north. This 
was superseded when David brought the ark 
from Kiriath-jearim to Jerusalem, and Solomon 
built the temple on Mount Moriah, about two 
thousand five hundred and fifty feet above 
the sea level. Moriah and Zion were the 
twin mountains of the Holy City, the latter the 
home of the house of David, while the former 
was the place of the divine presence. They 
might be said to stand for church and state, and 
much is missed by a popular confusion of Mount 
Zion with the site of the temple. 

The site of Jerusalem as a sanctuary among the 
hills and built upon the hills, was especially dear 
to the devout Hebrews. They were under no 
delusion as to its relative height. The difficult 
Sixty-eighth Psalm contrasts Jerusalem with the 
loftier heights of Hermon and Bashan, and says : 

Why look ye askance, ye high mountains, 

At the mountain which God hath desired for his abode? 

In their eyes it was "the mountain of the 
Lord;" "the mountain of the Lord's house;" "the 
holy hill" of Jehovah, where they were called 
to worship his holiness, and a symbol of his pro- 
tection of his people : — 



UPWARD 123 

I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains: 
From whence shall my help come? 
My help cometh from Jehovah, 
Who made heaven and earth. 

They that trust in Jehovah are as mount Zion, 
Which cannot be moved, but abideth for ever. 
As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, 
So Jehovah is round about his people. 

It is a recent discovery of the Egyptian Ex- 
ploration Society that the Tel-el- Yehudiyeh, or 
"Mound of the Jews," in Egypt, is the ruin of the 
Jewish temple erected by Onias, son of the high 
priest Onias III., about 160 B. C, with permission 
of King Ptolemy VI. ; and that it was mounted on 
an artificial hill, raised by human labor some 
sixty-eight feet above the flat land of the delta, 
and secured by a wall of brick some twenty feet 
thick. It reproduced the temple at Jerusalem on 
a scale of ond half the size. The Jews in Egypt 
seem to have felt that it would be no house of 
God, unless they could say, "Let us go up to it." 

In the New Testament, there is the same choice 
of the mountains as the fitting scene of great 
events. Our Lord preaches the great Sermon of 
the Foundations on a mountain side, coming 
down to meet the multitude, which came up to 
hear him. In that, he compares his church to a 
city set on a hill, which cannot be hid, just as 



124 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

Jerusalem was. He was transfigured before the 
three disciples on an unnamed mountain, meeting 
the great representatives of law and prophecy, 
whose story is bound up with the mountains. 
When he spent the night in prayer to his Father, 
he "went out into the mountain" for that purpose, 
and when he was crucified it was on Mount 
Calvary, the 



.... green hill far away 
Without the city wall, 



of Mrs. Alexander's hymn. After the Resurrec- 
tion, "the eleven disciples went into Galilee, unto 
the mountain where Jesus had appointed them," 
and met him there. "From the mount called 
Olivet, which is nigh unto Jerusalem," he as- 
cended to his Father, and passed from the region 
of sense to that of faith. 

Yet while our Lord made use of the mountains 
as the fitting scene of great transactions, and em- 
ploys the associations which they offer, he warns 
us that this is relative and even temporary. The 
woman of Samaria, who stood in sight of Mount 
Gerizim and was jealous for its honor, said, "Our 
fathers worshiped in this mountain; and ye say, 
that [on Mount Moriah] in Jerusalem is the place 
where men ought to worship." Jesus answered, 
"Believe me, the hour cometh, when neither in this 



UPWARD 125 

mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the 
Father . . . The hour cometh, and now is, when 
the true worshiper shall worship the Father [who 
is a Spirit], in spirit and truth." This was the 
great proclamation of the spirituality of the pres- 
ence and service of God. Local associations and 
backgrounds have their use, but they are not final- 
ities, and shall cease when men get beyond the 
need of them. 

III. Sometimes the Scriptures seem to speak of 
the visible heavens as the home of God, but 
always with rejection of the notion that they are 
worthy of our worship. Especially, they put him 
forward as the creator of heaven and of earth, in 
a way unknown to any other ancient literature, 
and subordinate the heavenly bodies to him as 
their maker and master. He is Jehovah of hosts, 
never one of that host. He has given to sun and 
moon their place in the heavens, and they are the 
witnesses of his greatness and his wisdom. His 
throne is in the heavens, and from heaven looks 
down upon the children of men. By this local- 
ization, men are enabled more easily to feel his 
personality, and to recognize his rule. 

On the other hand, we find along with these 
statements others which correct their imperfec- 
tion as expressions of God's greatness. "The 
heaven of heavens cannot contain thee," says 



126 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

Solomon in the prayer at the dedication of the 
temple. The Psalmist says : — 

Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? 

Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? 

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: 

If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there. 

If I take the wings of the morning, 

And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; 

Even there shall thy hand lead me, 

And thy right hand shall hold me. 

The greatness of God in comparison with the 
littleness of the creature, as it is stated in the 
fortieth chapter of Isaiah, is one of the sublimest 
themes of Hebrew poetry, and the heavens are ex- 
pressly included in the list of the things which are 
dealt with after his pleasure. 

The New Testament uses the same language, 
for the most part, as the Old in this regard. Men 
are forbidden to "swear by heaven, for it is God's 
throne/' They are bidden to pray to "Our Father 
in the heavens," to distinguish him from human 
fathers upon the earth. The Son of man "came 
down from heaven;" he "beheld Satan fallen as 
lightning from heaven;" he will come to judg- 
ment "on the clouds of heaven with power and 
great glory;" he is "the high priest, that hath 
passed into the heavens." Heaven and earth 
shall pass away, to be replaced by a new heaven 



UPWARD 127 

and a new earth. How are we to understand 
these expressions ? Not of the visible sky, which 
we know to be a mere appearance of a celestial 
roof, produced by the water suspended in our 
atmosphere. Many understand them to mean 
that there is, at some distance not ascertained, but 
above us and beyond the range of our sight, a 
place which is the especial center or focus of God's 
presence, and to which he will welcome his people 
after death. They believe that if one left this 
earth and proceeded for the right distance and in 
the right direction, he would find heaven, just 
as if he went in the direction of the star Alpha 
Centauri the twenty billions of miles which 
measure its distance from us, he would reach that 
star. 

When this belief is stated distinctly it arouses 
in us a certain repugnance, which is not removed 
by any qualifications as to the omnipresence of 
God. We feel that we have lost something by 
putting heaven to an immense distance from earth, 
and bringing all intercourse between them to a 
form of celestial telegraphy at an inconceivable 
distance. Nor does it correspond to much that 
is said in the New Testament about the relations 
of the two. We are told by Peter that "the 
heaven must receive" our Lord "until the times 
of [the] restoration of all things ;" but the same 



128 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

apostle had heard our Lord say, "Where two or 
three are gathered together in my name, there am 
I in the midst of them." 

There is a series of passages in the New Testa- 
ment which seem to bring heaven near to our 
human life, and to exclude the idea of its im- 
mense distance from us. At our Lord's bap- 
tism "the heavens were opened to him," or "rent 
asunder," and "a voice came out of the 
heavens," which was the voice of the Father de- 
claring his delight in his Son. We find that the 
same voice "out of the bright cloud" bore the 
same testimony at the Transfiguration; and that 
it came a third time as Jesus taught in the tem- 
ple — "a voice out of heaven" to declare before 
Gentile and Jew that the Father's will was in per- 
fect accord with that of the Son (John xii : 27- 
32). We learn that at Pentecost the "sound as 
of the rushing of a mighty wind" came from 
heaven; that Stephen in sight of the martyr's 
death was permitted to see in heaven, and beheld 
his Lord "standing on the right hand of God;" 
and that Saul's conversion at the gates of 
Damascus was through "a light from heaven, 
above the brightness of the sun," and the voice 
which won him to obedience and commissioned 
him for his work. And John in Patmos, after re- 
ceiving the messages to the seven churches, saw, 



UPWARD 129 

and beheld a door open in heaven, wherein a 
throne was set, and One sitting upon the throne. 

These are the passages which come the nearest 
to disclosing to us the relation of heaven to earth, 
and its influence upon the lives of men. None of 
them suggest that our inability to behold the con- 
tent of heaven is due to its vast distance from us, 
and not to our spiritual imperfection. They 
seem to teach that heaven is shut to us because we 
are not yet fit for the vision of its spiritual 
realities, and will be "opened' ' to us when we at- 
tain to that which the Master promised to 
Nathanael and Philip : "Ye shall see the heaven 
opened, and the angels of God ascending and 
descending upon the Son of man" — the true 
Jacob's ladder, which binds heaven and earth. 

An opposite error to that which removes heaven 
to an immense distance, is that which makes it to 
exist only in the human spirit, as a personal ex- 
perience. This notion has been very common 
among the Mystics. Thus Johann Scheffler 
writes : — • 

How far is it to heaven? Not very far, my friend; 
A single hearty step will all thy journey end. 

Hold there ! where runnest thou? Know heaven is in thee ; 
Seekest thou for God elsewhere, his face thou'lt never see. 

The same view also commends itself to ration- 
alists. "Are we still, like children," says Orville 



130 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

Dewey, "fancying that heaven is a beautiful city, 
into which one needs only the powers of locomo- 
tion to enter? Do we not know that heaven is 
in the mind; in the greatness and elevation and 
purity of our immortal nature?" Heaven is a 
thing more real and objective than is any state of 
the human spirit, and lies without us as well as 
within us. So we are taught by the disclosures of 
the New Testament about it. It was not a state 
of the spirit which was opened to our Lord at his 
baptism, or to Stephen in his death hour, or to 
Paul in his conversion. In the last case especially 
we see the inadequacy of this subjective notion of 
heaven. The persecutor's inner state was not in 
harmony with the light and the voice from 
heaven, but was to be made such through them. 

I find the view I have tried to present in the 
writing of some of our Christian poets, while in 
most of our hymns the more material conception 
of a distant region beyond the skies is dominant. 
Mr. T. D. Bernard writes : — 

Not in some distant world unknown, 

Not in the lofty skies, 
Not o'er the ocean vast and lone, 

God's kingdom lies. 

As near its unseen presence comes 

As air that circles round; 
Along our paths and in our homes 

Its voices sound. 



UPWARD 131 

Mrs. A. T. D. Whitney writes of the angels of 
the children : — 

The world is troublous, and hard and cold, 
And men and women grow gray and old ; 
But behind the world is an inner place, 
Where yet their angels behold God's face. 

Susan Coolidge (Miss Woolsey) asks as to the 
soul leaving the body : — 

Does it travel wide? Does it travel far, 

To find the place where all spirits are? 

Does it measure long leagues from star to star? 

With a rapture of sudden consciousness, 
I think it awakes to a knowledge of this — 
That heaven earth's closest neighbor is. 

That 'tis but a step from dark to day, 
From the worn-out tent and the burial clay, 
To the rapture of youth renewed for aye. 

And that just where the soul, perplexed and awed, 
Begins its journey, it meets the Lord, 
And finds that heaven, and the great reward 
Lay just outside its prison! 

Samuel Longfellow dwells on a natural 
analogy : — 

The sea is but another sky, 

The sky a sea as well; 
And which is earth, and which the heavens, 

The eye can scarcely tell. 



132 NATURE, THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

So when for us life's evening hour, 

Soft passing, shall descend, 
May glory born of earth and heaven 

The earth and heavens blend. 

Flooded with peace the spirit float, 

With silent rapture glow, 
Till where earth ends and heaven begins 

The soul shall scarcely know. 

Harriet Beecher Stowe feels the nearness of 
heaven in her sense of her nearness to those 
who have left her by death : — 

It lies about us like a cloud — 

A world we do not see; 
Yet the sweet closing of an eye 

May bring us there to be. 

Its gentle breezes fan our cheek; 

Amid our worldly cares 
Its gentle voices whisper love 

And mingle with our prayers. 

Sweet hearts around us throb and beat, 

Sweet helping hands are stirred, 
And palpitates the veil between 

With breathings almost heard. 

The silence, awful, sweet, and calm, 

They have no power to break; 
For mortal words are not for them 

To utter or partake. 

If the conception of heaven as a part of space, 
and that of heaven as a state of the spirit, be both 



UPWARD 133 

of them inadequate and misleading, what is the 
central thought as to its nature which will avoid 
these faults ? It is that of heaven as a fellowship 
or society, which unites God and his sinless or re- 
deemed creatures. It is our Father's house be- 
cause the Father is there. It is the Saviour's 
purpose, "That where I am, ye may be also," 
which foretells its blessedness to his people. 
Heaven is the full realization of that "fellowship 
with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ," 
which John sets forth as the inmost life of the 
church of Christ. It is the central spiritual fact 
of the whole spiritual universe, which knows no 
distance from any man's spirit except that which 
he makes by sin, and which even breaks through 
the bounds sin has set, to seek and find the lost. 

This fellowship we cannot but think as in space, 
that being the "form of thought" into which we 
put all our pictures of what is outside our minds. 
Heaven must be something vague and indefinite 
to us, unless we think of it as being as concrete and 
placed, as was the home we were born into. Yet 
we must guard against a localization, which shuts 
God out of immediate relation to all existences. 
We call this relation his omnipresence, but the 
word is not a happy one, and does not correspond 
to scriptural usage. Rather than conceive of God 
as present everywhere, and thus diffused like a 



134 NATURE,. THE MIRROR OF GRACE 

vapor through all space, we should think of all 
things as present to him, Coleridge says. Thus 
we escape a tendency which may land us in pan- 
theism. 

Heaven on man's side, is the loyal and loving 
realization of the fellowship to which God invites 
all his rational creatures. His will is our peace; 
his service our liberty; his presence our heaven. 

"Thou art the source and center of all minds, 
Their only point of rest, Eternal Word! 
From thee departing, they are lost, and rove 
At random, without honor, hope, or peace. 
From thee is all that soothes the life of man, 
His high endeavor and his glad success, 
His strength to suffer and his will to serve.' , 



MAY 17 190? 



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